"After Apple-Picking"

Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” is a poem which is both beautiful for its simplicity and meaningful for its metaphorical nature. In line with Frost’s poems on nature, “After Apple-Picking” deals literally with picking apples on a farm and plays to our senses. For example, words such as “blossom end” and “magnified apples” pervade the poem and bring us to the forefront of the action Frost is describing. Such a simple event is furthermore described with great detail. “Every fleck of russet” shows clear, for example. An event which in my mind takes just seconds is described as one of Frost’s longer poems.
The poem is an elegant extended metaphor for someone about to die and looking back on his life. The apples which the narrator picks represent life’s experiences and the narrator is now “over-tired” from the process. Although “there’s a barrel” he didn’t fill, the narrator is mostly content with what he has accomplished and looks back on his life with nostalgia. “Sleep” is repeated throughout the poem yet most surely represents death in the context of the metaphor. Further imagery can be taken in two ways yet in one way furthers the notion of a man looking back on a fulfilling life. His ladder is “pointed toward heaven”, for example. Thus, a seemingly simplistic poem about apple picking proves to be one of Frost’s most profound poems, about looking back at life and knowing that although it was not perfect it had meaning and fulfillment. The brilliant imagery which is used to describe the process of apple picking thus not only highlights an appealing natural process but life as a whole.