My farmer brother-in-law tells me he has finished harvesting his apples.
Which, as my mind works, reminds me of Robert Frost’s “After Apple Picking.”
Frost was always a part-time farmer and a full-time poet. Maybe that farming experience explains why he is both accessible and profound. His colloquial language, which he called the “sound of sense,” is immediately and disarmingly easy to understand. However, don’t be fooled by that simplicity, for beneath that surface is something much more interesting. A poem he declared, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
“After Apple-Picking” is a good example of what he is talking about.
The “delight” is in the simple pleasure of connection to the physical world brought to us in images that appeal to our senses — the ladder sticking through the tree, the scent of apples, the ice from the drinking trough and on the grass, and finally the magnified apples of his dream, rotating and revealing the surfaces of the apples, and most importantly the specks of russet on some of them, all of this culminating in the ache in his insteps for standing too long on his apple-picking ladder.
We are immersed in the physicality of the experience. But then a transition starts to take us to the promised wisdom. The poem’s speaker announces that he’ll leave a couple of apples still on the tree, for as winter approaches, he “is done with apple-picking now.” This is not only a seasonal decision; rather it is an anticipation of his approaching death. The dream, he then recounts, introduces us to the promised wisdom, a looking back on the speaker’s life in metaphorical terms. His apple-picking task suggests an unrealized ambition, expressed as “the great harvest,” he had “desired.”
We are no longer speaking literally about apples, the tens of thousands he had touched in his years of picking the fruit. A quotidian detail begins to open up the metaphor. The speaker describes handling each apple with great care so that it does not drop to the ground, for if it did it would be bruised and no longer fit for table fruit:
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
This is a perfect metaphor, combining a farming fact with the suggestion of another more significant idea.
A couple of key details can open that idea. The first is the image in the opening line, the ladder that seems to be pointing toward heaven, not just in a positional sense, but as an aspiration in opposition to the earth that receives the fallen apples, which are “as of no worth.” What “heaven” suggests is, of course, open to interpretation. I don’t think it has anything to do with religion although perhaps some will see echoes of that original Edenic apple lurking here. Rather, I would suggest heaven as representing the perfection in the unspecified harvest the speaker desired.
I offer in support of that interpretation the “fleck of russet” that appears in the speaker’s apple dreams. In this context, russet does not indicate color but a flaw in the apple’s skin that will make it less marketable, an imperfection in contrast to the perfection suggested by the ladder’s pointing toward heaven.
The speaker is closing down his apple-picking for the season, but also accepting not only the approaching winter, but his death, which might be like a hibernation or “just some human sleep.”
That wisdom that is possessed, Frost tells us with a wink, by the hibernating woodchuck, a wisdom beyond our understanding, just like the quest for perfection.