After Apple-Picking Themes
Versions of Reality
You might call "After Apple-Picking" a realist poem, in the same way that you would talk about a realist short story or novel. The poem depicts real-life activities in naturalistic detail, without...
Tradition and Customs
Frost takes an activity (apple-picking) that most would consider either good clean fun or hard manual labor, and gives it an unfamiliar and oh-so-slightly disconcerting edge. Apple-picking is done...
Dissatisfaction
The speaker has that feeling of too much of a good thing. He has probably been waiting for the apple harvest all summer, but now there are just so many apples to deal with that he has grown sick an...
Sin
The biggest "sin" in this poem is dropping an apple, but the wider concept of sin, corruption, and the Fall of Man (from the Book of Genesis) seems to be hinted at strongly in the language and imag...
Memory and the Past
What is past and what is present in this poem? Is "After Apple-Picking" narrated from within the orchard, or later at night? Did he really look through a sheet of ice that morning, or did his mind...