Lines 23-28 Summary

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.

Once again, our speaker is telling us not to worry. Once again, our speaker is giving us a directive.
In these lines, his advice is not to sweat the fact that, as we're journeying through them, the woods are getting pretty excited.
How do we know? Because the trees' leaves are rustling.
We don't know about you, but we here at Shmoop would be pretty freaked out if, every time we passed a tree, it quivered and quaked with excitement.
But it's cool, says the speaker—it's just "upstart inexperience."
Um, what? Here, we think he's telling us that the trees we're walking through are young—they're upstarts. And that means they don't have a ton of experience. They're easily excitable, like young kids seeing something new for the first time.
He's personifying nature again, our speaker. In these lines, he's making the trees come alive with excitement. They feel human, just like the rocky road and the ice-cold glacier.

Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

Here's the guide's first and only question. Where were these upstart trees not twenty years ago? According to our speaker, these trees are a bit full of themselves. They think they're so high and mighty, just because they're tall enough to overshadow some apple trees. Big deal, young'uns.
Let's zoom in on those apple trees for a bit. When we think of apple trees, we think of orchards and farms. We think of trees planted for human use. But it's clear that these trees have long since been abandoned. After all, an apple-farmer would never let woodpeckers fret his trees. And he certainly wouldn't let them be shaded out by a bunch of young upstarts. If these apple trees were still tended to, they'd be basking in the sun, all by themselves.
Once again, the speaker reminds us that time has past, and this place we're traveling through feels all but abandoned by everything but nature itself.