‘After Apple Picking’ by Robert Frost
Even before we think of either a summary or critical appreciation and analysis of ‘After Apple Picking’ by Robert Frost, we must remember that Robert Frost is a landscape poet.
His poetry is always enriched with the depiction of agrarian and natural scenes.
While ‘After Apple Picking’ in more than one way. corresponds to Frost’s regular thematic motif of bringing in the pastoral flavor of the landscape; his poem also bears a deceptive surface simplicity as the reader is invited to plunge himself into a world of uncertainty resulting out of the openness of the text and its unstated, and yet half-defined associations with some things other than the poem primarily surface.
The theme of ‘After Apple Picking’ by Robert Frost
In ‘After Apple Picking’, he appears to have presented a simple theme, that how peacefully an overtired villager is lulled to sleep by the “essence of winter sleep”, Nature.
An apple picker has a plentiful crop.
He is picking apples while standing on a two-pointed ladder. The winter evening falls soon.
The apple picker is fed up with apple picking now. The cold winter breeze is filled with the scent of apples.
It is a perfect setting to induce sleep and he is “drowsing off” under the powerful effect of Nature.
He wants to pick apples and tries to “rub the strangeness away”.
Soon, he is on his way to sleep. In this process
“magnified apples appear and disappear”
He does not confirm whether it would be human sleep or like woodchuck a long sleep.
Though Robert Frost insists that the poem is written purely in the context of a rural aspect and it shows nothing more than the beauty of nature prevailing upon the human mind, intellect, and will, yet the poem does allude to certain extended meanings.
For the analysis, visit- https://litersphere.blogspot.com/2020/11/after-apple-picking-by-robert-frost.html
