After Apple Picking
- Created by: Harleym7000
- Created on: 01-04-18 11:44
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- After Apple Picking
- After Apple-Picking explores the relationship between the human and natural worlds, focusing on a specific scenario, the end of an apple harvest and the subsequent consequences, both physical and psychic, for one person.
- It is all about the nature of creative if repetitive, fruitful work and the after-effects it can produce. The speaker reflects on the last hours of the harvest, perhaps as he sits and drinks his home-made cider, or rests on his bed. Either way he is exhausted; the season is coming to an end and sleep beckons.
- The reader is taken straight to the farm orchard and the image of ladder and tree, perhaps a symbol of some religious feeling deep down in the speaker.
- Is the ladder showing him the way? Certainly it connects to Jacob's ladder from the bible's book of Genesis, which led to heaven and spiritual redemption.
- As the poem progresses however, feelings of suspension and resignation start to dominate. The speaker knows that there are some apples left and that the barrel isn't full but his attitude is - to hell with those apples, I've had enough.
- Is the ladder showing him the way? Certainly it connects to Jacob's ladder from the bible's book of Genesis, which led to heaven and spiritual redemption.
- The reader is taken straight to the farm orchard and the image of ladder and tree, perhaps a symbol of some religious feeling deep down in the speaker.
- It is all about the nature of creative if repetitive, fruitful work and the after-effects it can produce. The speaker reflects on the last hours of the harvest, perhaps as he sits and drinks his home-made cider, or rests on his bed. Either way he is exhausted; the season is coming to an end and sleep beckons.
- The apple itself is strongly associated with the Garden of Eden, Eve and the Tree of knowledge of good and evil but this poem only gives a shake of the head to the idea that God is involved in this harvest.
- This speaker is far too wrapped up in the material details of apple-picking to have any thoughts about a deity. He's on the verge of a strange winter sleep.
- He has already seen the world in a different light, by looking through ice he took from a trough, which distorted his world view. But he consciously shattered that world, which led him to thoughts about dreaming, and the shape of his future.
- This speaker is far too wrapped up in the material details of apple-picking to have any thoughts about a deity. He's on the verge of a strange winter sleep.
- the syntax, rhyme and rhythm alter and deviate from the norm to provide alternative structure for the varying states of mind of the speaker. He is caught between reality and otherworldliness, between his own ego-driven needs and the natural cycle of his spirit.
- Time starts to blur as the speaker slowly sinks into uneasy sleep. He doesn't count sheep to help him drift off, he thinks back to the ten thousand thousand apples he's held, their fragrance, weight and form.
- They loom large in his mind. He could be entering an Alice in Wonderland kind of dreamland but here is no White Rabbit only a woodchuck (a ground squirrel, a type of marmot), about to hibernate.
- The speaker's sleep won't be hibernation, or will it? His sleep won't be a natural one, instinctive, following the seasons? If only that woodchuck could talk, this business of what kind of sleep would be put to bed once and for all.
- The woodchuck's sleep will be untroubled, the speaker's potentially full of, too full, of humanness. Or, in the final act of harvest, the speaker will sleep the immortal sleep, reaping what he has sown, a simple creative life underpinned by symbol and metaphor, a profound approach to the art of getting lost.
- The speaker's sleep won't be hibernation, or will it? His sleep won't be a natural one, instinctive, following the seasons? If only that woodchuck could talk, this business of what kind of sleep would be put to bed once and for all.
- They loom large in his mind. He could be entering an Alice in Wonderland kind of dreamland but here is no White Rabbit only a woodchuck (a ground squirrel, a type of marmot), about to hibernate.
- Time starts to blur as the speaker slowly sinks into uneasy sleep. He doesn't count sheep to help him drift off, he thinks back to the ten thousand thousand apples he's held, their fragrance, weight and form.
- After Apple-Picking explores the relationship between the human and natural worlds, focusing on a specific scenario, the end of an apple harvest and the subsequent consequences, both physical and psychic, for one person.
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