Apple Picking

A detailed Summary of Apple Picking

"Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

What form my dreaming was about to take."

There is no question here of tones playing against a traditional form; rather, an original rhythmic form grows out of the dramatic setting and the initial commitment in tone. Pre-sleep and sleepy reminiscence of the day condition all that is said, and the speaker's first words show what form his dreamy talk will take. His 'ladder's sticking through a tree'-which is accurate and earthy-but 'through a tree / Toward heaven.' As the apple-picker drowses off, narrative of fact about the ice skimmed from the trough gets mixed with dream, and the time references of the tenses become a bit confused:

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

What form my dreaming was about to take.

'Could tell' and 'was about to take' seem to refer both to the morning and to the present state of 'drowsing off.'

Everything said throughout the poem comes to me through sentences filled with incantatory repe

The metaphor is renewed in many other expressions, for example, in 'Magnified apples,' which are apples seen against the sky with daylight accuracy, and also great dream-like spheres. Other similarly precise details are 'blurred through the over-and-over way of recalling and describing them: 'stem end and blossom end,' 'load on load, 'ten thousand thousand.' The closing metaphor of the poem, the woodchuck's 'long sleep,' adds to the strangeness of 'winter sleep' by bringing in the non-human death-like sleep of hibernation. I am finally quite uncertain of what is happening, and that is what the poem is about:

In these two lines tone and rhythm work together beautifully, implying a great deal in relation to Frost's metaphor. The slight elevation of 'One can see' recalls the more mysterious seeing of the morning, just as the almost banal lyricism of 'This sleep of mine' sustains the rhythm of dream-confusion. The rest of the second line, barely iambic, barely rhyming, casual and rough, assures that the poet/speaker has at least one toe in reality. The contrasts

Some common words found in the essay are:
Robert Frost, , tell form, tell form dreaming, sleep fell tell, fell tell form, sleep fell, seeing morning, tone rhythm, form dreaming, tree /, fell tell, metaphor poem,

Approximate Word count = 718
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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Apple Picking

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