For this essay, I've chosen to talk about the poem "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost, a poem about the long-term choices we make that eventually ruin us. We make the choice to act upon some means to some end in the late future, which leads to a self-commitment, which leads to oppressive self-limitation, which finally leads to the loss of the end in sight and the psychological destruction of the person who made the original choice.
             The poem is about a man who has made the ambitious choice of growing an apple orchard and harvesting it. He makes this choice and acts on it, thereby forming a commitment to himself. He goes through with this commitment right up until the point where it controls him. At this point, he can no longer think for himself, and can no longer think or feel anything other than the process of picking apples. Thus, he has wasted his life and destroyed himself mentally, physically and emotionally.
             Had the persona decided not to act upon the thought of growing and harvesting an apple orchard, he would have regretted it, and with this regret, would have been driven into making some other decision with the thought "This time... I'll finish it. This time... I'll do it," and, in the end, would end up in the same place: self-committed, self-limited, self-oppressed, then broken, hopeless, wasted and ultimately controlled by whatever his new commitment would have been.
             In this poem, the apple orchard simply symbolises the ambitious choices we make that lead to commitment and ultimate self-destruction, the destruction of any mark of individuality and self-control by the forced conformity to some soul-crushing regime. This can be anything, for example, I choose to set myself up for a high-paying lifestyle, and as such, I plan to go to school, then university, then into some industry. During the time I'm at school, I make commitments to the school, become oppressed by the school, a...