A beautiful poem in which we see the effect of too many apples on the exhausted speaker as he drifts in and out of sleep.

Most of us have never spent a whole day picking apples. If we imagine such a day, it would no doubt be a soothing vision of daintily reaching among the branches and plucking one or two fruits to pop into our rustic wicker basket.

Hard Work in the Countryside

This poem leaves us in no doubt that this seemingly idyllic job is actually extremely hard work. The speaker of the poem has been picking apples all day, and we are reminded of the financial insecurity of the countryside worker: the apples have to be picked and stored before winter comes or else they will go to waste, and each fruit must be treated with care as it is valuable:

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. (lines 32 – 36)

Thus the speaker has had no choice but to keep picking until the job is done:

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired. (lines 27 – 29)

Once again we see that in the country, nature refuses to fit around mankind: jobs have to be done at certain times of the year whether convenient or not, as seen in other poems such as Mending Wall.

On the Way to Sleep

The speaker is both physically and mentally exhausted by the work he has done, and seems to be telling us the story of his day as he is on his way to sleep. Frost cleverly calls upon the different human senses to stress the complete and utter fatigue felt by the apple-picker, who can still feel the ache in his feet and hear the noise of the fruit rumbling through his head:

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. (lines 21 – 26)

The form of the poem also suggests the exhaustion of the speaker, who often seems to drop off to sleep mid-sentence. The lines vary enormously in length, and the rhyme scheme is irregular, suggesting that the speaker is not fully in control of his thoughts. The word “sleep” is used to finish the poem, and appears elsewhere a further five times, stressing the dream-like quality of the speaker’s narrative. He has seen so many apples over the course of the day that they now loom in and out of his thoughts and dominate his dreams: “Magnified apples appear and disappear” (line 18).

Imagination or Reality?

The speaker himself seems unsure of what is real and what is not, a feeling that he has felt all day, since looking at the world through a piece of ice that morning:

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. (lines 9 – 12)

With the ice, he simply “let it fall and break” (line 13). The vision of the apples is more persistent, suggesting as it does that the speaker cannot easily forget the nature of his daily toil. However, the fact that he has left his ladder pointing “toward heaven still” (line 2) perhaps indicates a certain satisfaction with his achievement: his day of toil has brought him one step nearer to God and he may rest happy with that thought.

Many of Frost's other poems portray a picture of work in the countryside: see also Mending Wall, "Out, Out-", and Putting in the Seed.