After Apple Picking

Imagery - 771-774. Look at the poem "After Apple-Picking". Answer the questions 1-6 at the end of the poem, and then in your blog briefly discuss what you believe the poem is about and use images from the poem to back up your ideas.

1.     Robert Frost portrays the experience so vividly by showing the speakers passion for apple picking. The speaker cannot stop thinking about the stress that comes with apple picking. The images the speaker’s ideals provoke are almost surreal and beautiful and at the same time there is some sort of  underlying stress.

2.     The speaker has a negative outlook on his job. He talks about being overtired. He says he has had to much apple picking. He dreams of apple picking he can’t stop thinking about it. He speaks of the apples as if he is almost disgusted by it.

3.     Help?

4.     I think that the reoccurring use of the word sleep is a direct link to the significance of sleep to the speaker. I think that it is more then just literal sleep. I think that the speaker is almost afraid of sleep because his dreams are the same as his every day grind. He sees apples all of the time and seeing it in his dreams I think upsets him or is off putting to him.

5.     A. I think that the ladder being pointed to the heavens could possibly be foreboding to a possible death.

B.  I think that the season changing is also a depressing thought because winter is usually somewhat connected with death with all the trees dying and leaves falling and grass dead. It has an overall gloomy meaning.

C. The harvesting could be interpreted also as possibly coming to an end. You harvest apples at the end of the season just before they start to fall because that is when they are harvested best. Possibly the harvester is reaching the end of his life and god is getting ready to harvest him.

D. Maybe the thing that shocked the harvester in the pane of glass was seeing himself. Maybe much of his life has gotten away from him and he is just starting to notice it.

6. A woodchuck sleeps for the winter like a bear. A human sleeps for a night. There is a major time difference between them.

            I think that this is the story of a man who has been doing his job for a very long time. Possibly longer than he ever anticipated being there. One day he sees his reflection and realizes he wasted much of his life. He realizes that apple picking is tedious and his whole life has been consumed by it. There may be a possibility that death is lurking for this man.