Subjects:
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, th
. . .
of Mercy)
The apples can also represent goals/needs/wishes/desires
missions in life - pick one. This blurring of experience focuses in the central metaphor of the poem, 'essence of winter sleep. Conder
published in a book Frost Centennial Essays edited by J. Frost loved pruning apple
trees - apparently the physical act of pruning the tree helped him organize
his thoughts.
to Keat's "Ode to a Nightingale"
The imagery, diction and mood of "After Apple-Picking" pointedly recall "Ode to a Nightingale"
with its drowsy longing for escape from the temporal world through art.
Its about labor, harvesting, desiring - what ? :apples, could be anything
Its about life all the things we do and how it makes us feel. But although the voice seems to be lapsing into the rhyming fits of insomnia, the fits shape themselves into distinct and subtle varied patterns. "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk" . Frost was afraid
that he as a man and his work (poetry) would not measure up to God's
judgement. He grew them, wrote many poems about them, and
always had apple trees nearby.
Check a book called The Dimensions of Robert Frost by Reginald Cook p104
calls it " a parable of accomplishment, told with casual simplicity.
Essay's Topics
All research is for reference purposes only.