Note the alliteration in the title: After A pple-Picking
It is, as its title implies about work, time and change: about an earthly harvest and what follows. It explores
the frustrations and rewards of labor, touching upon biblical texts. Its references to heaven and earth and its play on things fallen, lost and saved are anything but casual.
There is an essay in the Robert Frost Review '96:
"Looking through the Glass; Frost's AAP and Pauls 1 Corinthians". by David A
Sanders of St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.
Fisher talks about two allusions there:
Lewis Carroll "Through the Looking Glass" and 1 Corinthians 13, in which
Paul contrasts our occluded earthly vision with that in the kingdom of God:
"For now we see throught a glass, darkly: but then face to face". For
Frost, the problems of mortal knowledge are those of mortality itself - the
limitations from the loss of Eden. (After Apple-Picking in the Garden of
Eden by the children of Adam and Eve - we are made to labor - just as
described here, loss of grace, suffering and death). Also note the irony
that we keep picking and harvesting the apples analogous to the labor we
are made to do by the loss of the Garden of Eden, thereby re-committing
the sin of picking the apple from the tree of knowledge.
Essay "After Apple-Picking: Frost's Troubled Sleep" by John J. Conder
published in a book Frost Centennial Essays edited by J. Tharpe
Check a book called The Dimensions of Robert Frost by Reginald Cook p104
calls it " a parable of accomplishment, told with casual simplicity. The
analogy is suggested discreetly; it is not imposed upon the poem but remains
implicit in the context, as it always does in Frost's effective
There is an extensive discussion of the poem in "The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention by Reuben Brower p 23-27. Brower says, in p
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