Thoughts on "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost

from “After Apple Picking”

But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it [the ice on the water trough
like a pane of glass] fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet [brownish red] showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.


I have quoted more than the four or five lines of the poem because I am so fascinated by the rhyme scheme and want to show it off to myself some more. Frost writes with both end-rhyme in every line in the poem and composes interior rhyme as well, giving the poem an organic, circular sense. Since the poem masterfully visits at the same time both earth, and earth’s work, and heaven, and heaven’s other-wordliness, the rhyme scheme is a perfect match for this content. It weaves sounds and ideas in not irregular ways but also not in predictable, formal linking. Here I am even mirroring the sense of upside down and backwards love of the apple picking which the speaker alludes to—love because apple picking has been livelihood and somehow just quite beautiful—the scent of the apples, the visual richness of green tree and apples flecked with russet, the “hoary” [aged/venerable] grass. All reasons for love. And all poetic lines in the poem rhyme with at least one other line and yet never was a poem so apparently open-ended as if it is free verse. It is not: free verse. It is, as I say, completely and formally structured but complexly so. The introduction of a single sound and the circling back to it not in some expected sequence, is part of the powerful charm of this poem. Whether internal or end rhyme, the poet has managed to give the world a poem both unfussy and at the same time honed to a fine, fine point.


The recursive nature of the rhyme scheme is one way the speaker effectively suggests that he is now leaving apple picking—the literal harvest and also “apple picking,” a metaphor for human experience. “Magnified apples appear and disappear” in this line which, at a narrative level, is recognizable by anyone who has ever dreamed, even day-dreamed. Reality is distorted in this quasi-awake state ,just like the appearing and disappearing apples. And also in this dreamy state, a vivid sense of touch can be intensified in the mind’s eye. The “magnified apples” come and go but are far from gone, and the “instep arch” can still feel the “”pressure of the ladder-round” (in a dreamy/half-awake kind of way). The rhyming of “ache” and “take” connecting the dreamy, drowsy sense of the speaker with the line “My instep arch not only keeps the ache” is breathlessly perfect. The heaertache of earth’s love is mimicked by the aching of the instep arch. The latter is physical and the former is metaphorical but Frost captures earth’s hardest ache (that of the heart) with just enough reference to pain (in the instep arch) having been poised for hours on “ladder-rounds.” The comparison of heart-ache with the arch-ache is merely implied but clearly suggested later in the poem (in lines not quoted here) by “For I have had too much/Of apple-picking: I am overtired/Of the great harvest I myself desired.”


This aching instep and the joy/work/beauty/sadness of the actual apple picking and its dreamy aftermath is just such exact and yet open-eneded poetic expression of a complex and counterintuitive sense everyone understands at some level. The speaker longs for a retreat from the world (metaphorically represented by the apples and the apple trees, surely, also, an archetypal reference to Eden and Eve’s apple). Yet this is not an easy retreat because the speaker keeps hearing “ . . . from the cellar bin/The rumbling sound/Of load on load of apples coming in” (the rhyme of “bin” and that common word “in” now serving as elegant linking diction). The speaker feels an indecisive sense, a desire for heaven and at the same time an attachment to earth, as suggested by the swaying ladder and bending boughs but still the call to something heavenly—attained, perhaps, by the release from earth through sleep and dreams. The thrust of this controlling second metaphor—sleep/dreams-- (the apples being the first) appears throughout the poem. Who has not felt the pull and purity of heaven at the same time he feels the pull of earth with its complicated love? The apple picker, seeking retreat from all of earth’s responsibilities and longings—the “load on load of apples coming in” --captures this conflict well in these homely-yet-magnificent lines, magnificent because the human condition is so well explained in that which only poetry can accomplish with its allusion, sound, and brevity.