After Apple Picking Analyst
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 exploresthe 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 ASanders of St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.Fisher talks about two allusions there:Lewis Carroll "Through the Looking Glass" and 1 Corinthians 13, in whichPaul 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". ForFrost, the problems of mortal knowledge are those of mortality itself - thelimitations from the loss of Eden. (After Apple-Picking in the Garden ofEden by the children of Adam and Eve - we are made to labor - just asdescribed here, loss of grace, suffering and death). Also note the ironythat 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
(A Masqueof Mercy) The apples can also represent goals/needs/wishes/desiresmissions in life - pick one. This blurring of experience focuses in the central metaphor of the poem, 'essence of winter sleep. Conderpublished in a book Frost Centennial Essays edited by J. Frost loved pruning appletrees - apparently the physical act of pruning the tree helped him organizehis 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 anythingIts 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 afraidthat he as a man and his work (poetry) would not measure up to God'sjudgement. He grew them, wrote many poems about them, andalways had apple trees nearby. Check a book called The Dimensions of Robert Frost by Reginald Cook p104calls it " a parable of accomplishment, told with casual simplicity.
Common topics in this essay:
Reuben Brower,
Masque Mercy,
Garden Eden,
Ode Nightingale,
Apple-Picking Note,
Reginald Cook,
Looking Glass,
Hamlet Sleep,
Adam Eve,
Robert Frost,
garden eden,
robert frost,
ode nightingale,
frost loved,
looking glass,
apple tree,
apple trees,
1 corinthians,
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Acceptance Essays
