After Apple-Picking Essay

1086 Words5 Pages
“After Apple-Picking”, by Robert Frost is a poem about a man who has grown weary from picking apples. The speaker is somewhere between consciousness and a dream-like state as he recounts his day of picking apples. His exhaustion is so great that he is not sure if he is simply drifting off to sleep or facing death. Frost is known for avoiding traditional verse forms and using rhyming erratically. “After Apple-Picking” is no exception to his signature style. Frost uses varied rhyming patterns, imagery, and metaphors to set the tone, convey the speaker’s state of mind, depict the scene and draw the reader in. The first device used is verse form and rhyme pattern. As is common in Frost’s poems, the verse form used is untraditional and several different rhyming patterns are used throughout. “After Apple-Picking” is an irregular ode; it contains 42 lines of varied length. Lines 2, 16 and 32 are particularly short while other lines: “There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” (line 30) as well as lines 1 and 34, are quite long. The poem is not divided into stanzas; rather it is a single, unbroken narrative. Frost does not follow a set rhyming pattern in this poem. In parts, rhymes occur in rhyming pairs of lines in succession called couplets: “Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. / But I am done with apple-picking now” (5-6). Triplets also occur: “But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell” (14-16). Sometimes, rhymes occur at every other line: “Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. / I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight” (7-9). At other times, a rhyme occurs at every fourth line and in other parts, a rhyme occurs every fifth line: It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take.
Open Document