About after apple picking

After Apple Picking После сбора яблок

Все с лесенки на небо вверх смотри —
Я выбился из сил,
Еще до верху бочку не набил,
Еще там яблока два или три
Сидят на ветке, как щегол иль зяблик,
Но я уже устал от сбора яблок.
Настоян этой ночью зимний сон,
То запах яблок: им я усыплен.
Я не могу забыть тот миг загадки,
Увиденный сквозь льдистое стекло, —
С воды его я утром взял из кадки,
В нем все лучилось, искрилось, цвело.
Оно растаяло и разломилось,
Но все ж на миг
Передо мною сон возник,
И я постиг,
Каким видением душа томилась.
Все яблоки, огромны и круглы,
Мерцали вкруг меня
Румянцем розовым из мглы,
И ныла голень и ступня
От лестничных ступенек, перекладин.
Вдруг лестницу я резко пошатнул
И услыхал из погреба глубоко
Подземный гул,
Шум яблочного яркого потока.
Да, был я слишком жаден,
И оказался свыше сил
Тот урожай, что сам же я просил.
Пришлось, наверно, яблок тысяч десять,
Как драгоценные, потрогать, взвесить,
А те,
Что осыпались щедро,
С пятном, с уколами от жнива,
Забродят в бочках в темноте,
Как сусло сидра.
И я томлюсь лениво
Какою-то истомою дремотной.
Один сурок,
Коль не уснул, узнать бы мне помог,
То спячка зимняя и сон животный,
Иль человеческий то сон.

Перевод М. Зенкевича

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
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.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the water-trough,
And held against the world of hoary grass.
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.
Magnified apples appear and reappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
That rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
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.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Источник

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of «After Apple-Picking» (1914)

At the end of a long day of apple picking, the narrator is tired and thinks about his day. He has felt sleepy and even trance-like since the early morning, when he looked at the apple trees through a thin sheet of ice that he lifted from the drinking trough. He feels himself beginning to dream but cannot escape the thought of his apples even in sleep: he sees visions of apples growing from blossoms, falling off trees, and piling up in the cellar. As he gives himself over to sleep, he wonders if it is the normal sleep of a tired man or the deep winter sleep of death.

In terms of form, this poem is bizarre because it weaves in and out of traditional structure. Approximately twenty-five of the forty-two lines are written in standard iambic pentameter, and there are twenty end-rhymes throughout the poem. This wandering structure allows Frost to emphasize the sense of moving between a waking and dream-like state, just as the narrator does. The repetition of the term “sleep,” even after its paired rhyme (“heap”) has long been forgotten, also highlights the narrator’s gradual descent into dreaming.

In some respects, this poem is simply about apple picking. After a hard day of work, the apple farmer completely fatigued but is still unable to escape the mental act of picking apples: he still sees the apples in front of him, still feels the ache in his foot as if he is standing on a ladder, still bemoans the fate of the flawless apples that fall to the ground and must be consigned to the cider press.

Yet, as in all of Frost’s poems, the narrator’s everyday act of picking apples also speaks to a more metaphorical discussion of seasonal changes and death. Although the narrator does not say when the poem takes place, it is clear that winter is nearly upon him: the grass is “hoary,” the surface of the water in the trough is frozen enough to be used as a pane of glass, and there is an overall sense of the “essence” of winter. Death is coming, but the narrator does not know if the death will be renewed by spring in a few months or if everything will stay buried under mindless snow for all eternity.

Because of the varying rhymes and tenses of the poem, it is not clear when the narrator is dreaming or awake. One possibility is that the entirety of the poem takes place within a dream. The narrator is already asleep and is automatically reliving the day’s harvest as he dreams. This explanation clarifies the disjointed narrative — shifting from topic to topic as the narrator dreams — as well as the narrator’s assertion that he was “well upon my way to sleep” before the sheet of ice fell from his hands.

Another explanation is that the narrator is dying, and his rambling musings on apple picking are the fevered hallucinations of a man about to leave the world of the living. With that in mind, the narrator’s declaration that he is “done with apple-picking now” has more finality, almost as if his vision of the apple harvest is a farewell. Even so, he can be satisfied in his work because, with the exception of a few apples on the tree, he fulfilled all of his obligations to the season and to himself. Significantly, even as he falls into a complete sleep, the narrator is unable to discern if he is dying or merely sleeping; the two are merged completely in the essence of the oncoming winter, and Frost refuses to tell the reader what actually happens.

Источник

After Apple-Picking Introduction

By Robert Frost

After Apple-Picking Introduction

«After Apple-Picking» is one of those early poems by Robert Frost that makes people think of him as a quaint, New England poet. Along with «The Road Not Taken» and others, this poem reminds people of simple American country life, with kids on a tire swing and mom bringing out the lemonade. But this image of Frost drives many poetry scholars crazy, because they know that the man was so much more than that. Even his peaceful New England poems – and this is definitely one of them – contain a depth and mystery that few American writers have been able to capture. «After Apple-Picking» makes a quintessential autumn activity seem like a solemn and spiritual ritual, full of strange and disturbing implications.

«After Apple-Picking» was published in Frost’s second collection, North of Boston, in 1915. His first collection was titled A Boy’s Will, and it contained many short lyric poems about nature and country life. North of Boston, on the other hand, contains several longer poems, and Frost also began to explore human dramas and conflicts. It is one of his best-known works, with such classics as «Mending Wall,» «Home Burial,» and «Death of the Hired Man.» The collection gave him his first taste of fame. However, by this point Frost was still considered by many people to be a very talented «regional» poet. In later years, he would become one of America’s most recognizable writers, and one of the few poets to grace the cover of Time magazine. He even delivered a poem at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Frost’s poems are considered hard to place within the main literary traditions of the twentieth century. He wrote in iambic pentameter, sometimes in rhyme and sometimes not, at a time when many poets were experimenting with looser forms. He didn’t try to write in complicated forms like the villanelle or the pantoum. And yet the simplicity and directness of Frost’s poems also stand in contrast to the dominant movements in English poetry of the nineteenth century – Romanticism and Victorianism – and to the two great American poets of that century – Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. «After Apple-Picking» is an excellent introduction to Frost’s unique combination of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and to some of his juiciest (and we’re not talking about apple juice, either), most mature work that cannot be clearly encompassed by either era.

What is After Apple-Picking About and Why Should I Care?

People often have their most interesting thoughts just before they go to sleep. Don’t you ever wish you put those thoughts into words? This poem demonstrates just how much you can understand about a person from the vague, drifting thoughts that occur just before passing into the land of Nod. It should make you want to leap out of bed and add to your journal right at the point when you think, «Sleepy-time!» The entire poem takes place in those fleeting moments between wakefulness and sleep, when the speaker reviews the events of the day and finds meanings that he had not considered before.

As psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud recognized, your dreams and fantasies can provide deep insights into your hopes and worries. Or, on a more straightforward level, your bedtime thoughts can clarify what happened during the day. But few people actually take the time to collect their thoughts at the end of a long, hard day. Most of us just want to pass out and dream about winning the Super Bowl («Hey, Peyton Manning, we’re open in the end zone!»).

The speaker of «After Apple-Picking» keeps close track of the progress of his thoughts before sleep. It’s fascinating how he can recognize that he’s falling asleep without that consciousness impacting the process of falling asleep. Speaking of falling, the speaker discovers just how much his own everyday experience is structured by stories written thousands of years ago, in Biblical times. Thoughts about falling ice and falling apples lead to suggestions of lost innocence and worldly corruption. But these implications never come to the surface of the poem: they hover just beneath.

In the same way, you probably have fears, desires, and concerns that influence you in subtle ways, ways that you might not even recognize. Paying closer attention to the patterns in your drowsy fantasies can lead to sudden «Eureka!» moments like, «Wow, I really was bothered by that thing she said to me after calculus class: even though I didn’t think anything of it at the time, all my thoughts now seem connected by that event.» Self-knowledge is always a good thing, and great poets like Robert Frost can help illuminate the hidden meanings beneath your most random, run-of-the-mill thoughts.

After Apple-Picking Resources

Websites

On «After Apple-Picking»
Excerpts of brief critical analyses of the poem by respected scholars.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)
A useful collection of sites devoted to literary criticism and biographical information about Frost.

Poetry Foundation: Robert Frost
A wide selection of Frost’s poems and a good biography on the poet.

Video

Frost Documentary
A scene from a documentary about Frost, including footage of the poet speaking.

Mr. T Picks Apples
Well, there’s no video of Robert Frost picking apples, so here’s a video of Conan O’Brien and Mr. T spending a day at an orchard.

Audio

Robert Frost Out Loud
Audio recordings and texts of Frost’s poetry, including a reading of «After Apple-Picking.»

Robert Frost Reads
Hear how Frost read «After Apple-Picking.»

Images

Frost on the Farm
A photo of the elderly Robert Frost at his farm. Where are the apples?

Apple-Picking!
An image of an apple orchard, with a «two-pointed ladder» that has round rungs like the one described in the poem.

Historical Documents

North of Boston
The first edition of North of Boston, as it appeared to readers in 1915.

Books

Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini
Noted poetry professor and Frost-o-phile Jay Parini recently published an acclaimed biography of the poet.

The Notebooks of Robert Frost
Frost’s notebooks weren’t published during his lifetime, but they now provide us with juicy details about his writing process, life, and philosophy.

Источник

After Apple-Picking

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
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.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
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.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
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.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

This poem is in the public domain.

One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, Robert Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections, including including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923). Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. He died in Boston in 1963.

Источник