After apple picking by robert frost
The poem describes how, after a strenuous day of apple-picking, the speaker dreams in which his previous activities return to him 'magnified', blurred and distorted by memory and sleep. On a deeper level, however, it presents us with an experience in which the world of normal consciousness and the world that lies beyond it meet and mingle. 'I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight', says the narrator, and this strangeness, the 'essence of winter sleep', is something he shares with the reader.From the outset, nature seems to have become alien to the speaker. The first section concludes with the speaker's commenting that he is no longer interested in picking apples, in appropriating nature to his own uses: "But I am done with apple-picking now." The parallel between his drowsiness and the "essence of winter sleep" is, at best, tenuous, held together by an uncommitted colon in the last line of
Frost's speaker, like Keats', is suffused with drowsy numbness, yet enters the visionary state necessary to artistic creation:Essence of winter sleep is on the night,The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. " The "essence," in short, is more directly associated with "the scent of apples" than with the speaker's sleepThe central problems of the poem are posed in the opening lines of its conclusion with the introduction of the ambiguous word "trouble" and the provocative image of "sleep": "One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. " Although the trouble and the "sleep" are intimately connected in the lines, for purposes of analysis it is best to keep them separate. The long and short lines, the irregular rhyme scheme, the recurrent participles (indicating work), the slow tempo and incantatory rhythm all suggest that repetitive labor has drained away his energy. " The sense of value which he associated with manual contact ("cherish in hand") is confirmed in the lines 'For all/ That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, /Went surely to the cider-apple heap /As of no worth. In that case it is possible that he is entering the world of renewal, that his sleep will be composed of pleasant dreams, a contemplation of the ideal based on the real; and it is possible that his trouble will be minimal, composed of the physical aftereffects of too much apple-picking: the "ache" and the "pressure" retained by his "instep arch"; the feel of the swaying ladder; the "rumbling sound" of apples. Simply put, he "desired" a "great harvest," and the desire was sufficiently strong to justify extraordinary discipline and control: "There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. Arranged in the order most convenient for answering them, two questions emerge in "After Apple-Picking": What is the nature of the sleep? What is the nature of the trouble? If the speaker is divorced from nature, then what would "just some human sleep" be? One can concede that the speaker is physically and mentally fatigued, his desire for a "great harvest" satiated. The speaker makes it eminently clear that he once highly valued his harvest. the statement, "Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. The perfume of the apples - equated through "essence" with profound rest - has the narcotic, almost sensual effect of ether. The speaker himself does so, since he apparently knows what will trouble his sleep but is uncertain about the kind of sleep overtaking him. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sightI got from looking through a pane of glassI skimmed this morning from the drinking trough.
Common topics in this essay:
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scent apples,
essence winter,
winter sleep night,
scent apples drowsing,
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apples drowsing,
trouble sleep,
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