Analysis of After Apple Picking

AAnalysis of “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost.
Mohammad Alawawdeh
November 20, 2011
The Speaker in the poem “After Apple-Picking” has been upon a ladder picking apples all day long. He has not picked every apple, but the night is coming and he is getting tired. As the speaker has some thoughts about his vision he had that morning, while he has these thought he may or may not be falling asleep. The speaker is tired of picking apples, because there are a lot of them and he had to be careful not to let them fall. He wonders whether he is in a normal sleep, or in a deep sleep.
“After Apple-Picking” is a poem in the shape of dramatic monologue. The poem typically involves a critical moment of a specific situation, where the speaker reveals his character. The character explains his/her feelings, actions, and motives. This poem by Robert Frost is s basically iambic, and mostly in pentameter. Throughout the poem, both rhyme and line-length are manipulated and varied with subtlety. There are long and short lines, to talk about the in and out of the poem. The word “sleep” appears six times in this poem, three of them in the middle of the poem, in fact it’s all over the poem.
The first word of the title of the poem is “After”, which implies that the experience is done, and it’s a past. A hyphen separates the second and third words in the title, the hyphen like in Robert Frost’s poem “The Wood-Pile”, represent the unity between both words and how both words are like the body and soul. The word “Apple” in the title can represent experiences in life, good and bad experiences depending on the condition of the apple. Apples can also be metaphors for sin, or the lost of insane and mortality.   The word “still” in the second line of the poem suggest that the speaker is still picking apples and wants to continue picking apples, but the first word of the title is “After”, which suggest that he should be done with picking apples. In the first line of the poem, the speaker...