After Apple Picking :: After Apple Picking

later Apple Picking   In Frosts rime any deviation, not only from the iambic foot but from the iambic pentameter line as well, is an important marker of the speakers state of mind, his operate on, and his capacity for irony. After Apple Picking keeps resolutely returning to pentameter lines, but the speaker is drowsy, and the interruption twelve-syllable line - My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree - is corresponding the last murmured words before sleep. Of course, it also represents, as does the whole skilled structure of the poem, Frosts own precise control of tone, as he creates a speaker who is precariously upon his way to sleep. This fatigued vulnerability manifests itself in an escalating slippage of control from ten-syllable lines to foreshortened lines corresponding For any / That struck the earth, or eleven-syllable lines like No social function if not bruised or spiked with stubble. And as the speaker moves toward an increasing scholarship of the symbolic underpinnings of his exhaustion, which is the result not just of his picking apples but of other(a) more visceral frustrations and fears, the frequency of these variations increases. (Lines 1, 2, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, and 42 vary from the pentameter only lines 18 and 34 be extra-syllabic.) His awareness and fear of this loss of control are manifested in the final lines The woodchuck could say whether its like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some homo sleep. What he fears is not so much death as the truly state the poem has mimicked - that is, a suspension between not-life and not-death where language is narcotize toward incoherence and uncontrol. . . . . Matter . . . makes itself felt even as it capitulates to its own changeable nature. If the apple will fall in After Apple Picking, if it, like the speaker on his way to dreaming, is about to go bruised to the cider mass where it will be pressed into an essence of it self, it nonetheless maintains through all its transmutations an identifiable appleness. The apple holds, against the authoritative prosodic erosion of waking reality into dream state, its own sensual place as an essential portion in the spell to which the speaker is succumbing.