After Apple-Picking

After Apple-Picking is a poem that struck me as odd because there are So many ways of interpreting it. It holds true to several themes that Frost focuses on: life and death, the limitations of man and his struggle with existence, and reality verses the dream.

When reading this poem, I was captured by the need to identify what the apples could be representing. The apple is commonly used as a religous theme because of the Adam and Eve story. When researching Frost, the passages I found about him referred to him as skeptical, though always tosssing the ideas of God like a child tossing a ball up and down. This poem does not discard that connection. It does have a ladder that pointed "heavenward" while the speaker has not filled up a barrel of apples (possibly an allusion to sin). Once he starts dreaming, after the temptation of the apples with their soft aroma put the speaker to sleep, the situation changed. The apples grew and shrank and suddenly there are no longer a few but ten thousand thousand fruit to touch (strange wording). Consequently, the ladder starts to bough (almost as if it were ladder to heaven were breaking with the growing weight of sins and their large numbers). But once all of the apples (no matter what form they took) fell they were all the same. This is reinforced in the bible that sin is sin. Thus, the speaker seems to have a troublesome sleep- sleep alluding to death and/or actual sleep.

How does this interpretation of the poem fit the time of modernism? The modernist time was a time of unruly excess and the religious devotion decreasing. Though Frost was not devoted to religion, the speaker did say, "For I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired." He may be trying to communicate that his is tired of this life-style.

Another way of looking at the allusion of apples without such religous ties is that the apples are unaccomplished goals of the speaker and heaven is an allusion to where he saw himself headed in life. In the subconscious, all of the speakers dreams or his true desires come out (note: Freud's Interpretions of Dreams came out around 1899 and this poem was published in 1915). Dreams created a means of understanding a person's life. Failing at his mission of life, tired of the work of the harvest, the speaker would have a disturbed sleep as well as death. Even the goals that he did manage to accomplish the ones that "struck the earth" all went to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. The apples he has picked, the goals he has accomplished, do not amount to anything.