After Apple Picking Analyst

After Apple-Picking Note the alliteration in the title: After A pple-Picking It is, as
its title implies about work, time and change: about an earthly harvest and what
follows. It explores the frustrations and rewards of labor, touching upon biblical
texts. Its references to heaven and earth and its play on things fallen, lost and
saved are anything but casual. There is an essay in the Robert Frost Review '96:
"Looking through the Glass; Frost's AAP and Pauls 1 Corinthians". by David A
Sanders of St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY. Fisher talks about two
allusions there: Lewis Carroll "Through the Looking Glass" and 1 Corinthians 13,
in which Paul contrasts our occluded earthly vision with that in the kingdom of
God: "For now we see throught a glass, darkly: but then face to face". For Frost,
the problems of mortal knowledge are those of mortality itself - the limitations
from the loss of Eden. (After Apple-Picking in the Garden of Eden by the children
of Adam and Eve - we are made to labor - just as described here, loss of grace,
suffering and death). Also note the irony that we keep picking and harvesting the
apples analogous to the labor we are made to do by the loss of the Garden of
Eden, thereby re-committing the sin of picking the apple from the tree of
knowledge. Essay "After Apple-Picking: Frost's Troubled Sleep" by John J.
Conder published in a book Frost Centennial Essays edited by J. Tharpe Your
library may have this. Check a book called The Dimensions of Robert Frost by
Reginald Cook p104 calls it " a parable of accomplishment, told with casual
simplicity. The analogy is suggested discreetly; it is not imposed upon the poem
but remains implicit in the context, as it always does in Frost's effective double-
meaning poems." There is an extensive discussion of the poem in "The Poetry of
Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention by Reuben Brower p 23-27.