After Apple-Picking Group

Question:

allu
allu
Student
High School - 10th Grade

Give any 3 examples to suggest that apple picking is not yet over in Frost's poem.

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Posted by allu on Saturday March 28, 2009 at 5:59 AM and tagged with after apple-picking, after applepicking, frost, theme.

Answers:

  1. accessteacher
    accessteacher Teacher
    High School - 10th Grade

    eNotes Editor

    The poem "After Apple Picking" by Robet Frost contains many hints that the apple harvest is not yet completed. Here are three to get you started...

    The first lines state:

    My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

    Toward heaven still

    This suggests that apple picking is going on by the use of the word "still", as if to say there are more apples to be collected.

    Then, the speaker of the poem states:

    And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

    Beside it, and there may be two or three

    Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

    This clearly tells us that there are more apples for the picking!

    Lastly, when we consider the symbolic nature of apple picking (objectives or possessions that are acheived through life), the speaker's dream of apples and his obsession (or satiation) with them indicates that there are always more "apples" in life to be plucked from the tree of opportunity - it is just that the speaker now no longer wants any more apples as he is "done with apple-picking now":

    Magnified apples appear and disappear,

    Stem end and blossom end,

    And every fleck of russet showing clear.

    This clearly explores one of the central themes of the poem - weariness with life and perhaps acceptance of yourself and what you have done as you approach death.

    Sources:
    http://www.enotes.com/after-apple-picking-salem

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    Posted by accessteacher on Saturday March 28, 2009 at 7:03 AM