Robert Frost: Allegory, Spiritual Crisis and Punxsutawney Phil in “After Apple-Picking”

  Prior to his death the great Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) wrote this haiku (per Robert Hass’s translation):

deep autumn –
my neighbor, I wonder
how does he live?^[a]

“Deep autumn” draws our thoughts from the harvest to the coming winter and, symbolically, the end of life. For those at the point of imminent death, as Bashō was when he composed this haiku, the nearly universal instinct to reflect and reevaluate the life we lived overcomes us, and so we reach for a sense of community and shared experience, in part to justify or repent our own life choices. Bashō’s haiku is regarded as one of the finest ever written, not only because this kind of end-of-life reflection resonates with us, but also because of the subtle suggestion of bitter-sweet pathos, as we register an ironic surprise in the reclusive Bashō’s question, as if the all-consuming task of living his life had too long displaced consideration of his neighbor’s existence, and thus his desire for a communal experience is transformed into a recognition of his own insularity.

  A soul-searching inquiry also pervades “After Apple-Picking,” where Robert Frost employs his familiar pastoral frame by staging the poem in a rural setting at the end of harvest time, another “deep autumn.” Although the poem purports to take place after apple-picking, the narrator states: “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree/ Toward heaven still.” The ladder remains, the harvest not yet completed, but the laborer has quit. A strange and troubling lethargy has befallen him, he reports: “Essence of winter sleep is on the night,” “I am drowsing off,” and “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight.” This strangeness distorts perception: a pane of ice is used as a “glass” through which to view “the world of hoary grass”; and when it melts and is dropped, the apple-picker says, “But I was well/ Upon my way to sleep before it fell,” signaling a time-space disconnect. There are visions where “Magnified apples appear and disappear” and auditory hallucinations of “the rumbling sound/ Of load on load of apples coming in.” Throughout all, Frost’s opportunistic treatment of rhythm and rhyme reinforces the general sense of disorientation in the apple-picker’s mind; sound and movement are rendered unpredictable, hence some connections seem to be spontaneously made where others appear to be missed. The poem unexpectedly ends with these enigmatic lines:

One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

This fantastic ending, with its ironic reference to our furry soothsayer, Punxsutawney Phil, belies and indeed seems intended to alleviate the internal turmoil tracked within the poem. The apple-picker makes light of the problem, a form of evasion and denial, but his dilemma is a real one. Indeed, to be “done with apple-picking” has two dimensions here: one refers to the end of a certain kind of purposeful labor and its tangible and intangible rewards; the other denotes a spiritual end that began in the Garden of Eden.

  Generally, both the experience and product of labor is what binds us to this life. Through labor we reify and hence realize our dreams, as Frost writes in “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Labor beneficially fulfills personal needs and supports our existence. Even the labor inherent in our avocational pursuits achieves a desirable good by keeping us active and engaged in the business of living. Frost says labor is best when it gives pleasure and satisfies need, and so gains divine approval, as in “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Labor in “promises to keep” is the saving grace that stirs the narrator from his reverie in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and helps him deflect the entrancement of the snow and woods that endanger him. Labor is also the essential glue of community, as in “The Tuft of Flowers” (“Men work together . . . Whether they work together or apart”), “The Grindstone” (“And he and I between us ground a blade”) and again in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (“The blows that a life of self-control / Spares to strike for the common good”).

  Yet a balance between labor and rest is necessary for the sake of sanity. Frank Lentricchia points out: “only within certain prescribed limits, defined by labor, is the self released into the aesthetic state where it may experience the healing powers of an imaginative freedom that lifts us briefly out of what Wallace Stevens aptly called the ‘malady of the quotidian,’ the dull, ritualized rhythms of our every day lives.”^[1]  On the other hand, Lentricchia says, unrestrained freedom from labor can be deleterious, observing the psychic disturbances of “The Hill Wife.” Young and recently married to a husband who lacks the requisite empathy, her loneliness leads to a disengagement from daily tasks which in turn sparks paranoid visions that cast malevolent shadows over her home life, eventually causing her to wander off one day never to return: “When cut loose from the quotidian, the free mind may wander toward the perilous point where common sense’s force of gravity can no longer be felt; the point where the mind, free from the comforts of dull fact and the pleasurable constrictions of daily work, can entertain without check grotesque visions which, once fully experienced, destroy the possibility of a return to normality.”^[2]

  The visions of our protagonist in “After Apple-Picking,” however, are neither due to too much nor too little labor. Apple-picking as a specific kind of labor is, of course, laden with religious symbolism, as Frost’s poem makes clear from the start (“My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree/ Toward heaven still”), unequivocally invoking the notorious apple-picking in the Garden of Eden and its consequent penalty of a mortal life. In condemning Adam and Eve, God says:

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.^[3]

As a practical matter, the mythical sentence to lifelong work is delimited by the fact that only through work are we able to sustain ourselves, failing which we perish. This is a recurrent theme in many of Frost’s poems, particularly in “The Death of the Hired Man” where the end of Silas’s ability to work forecasts the end of his life. The apple, thus, becomes a reminder of our mortality and the practical reasons for work.

  Metaphorically, the end of apple-picking and the impulse to “sleep” might serve the purpose of a momento mori poem, and one too easily makes the connection between “done with apple picking” and done with life. But it is the narrator’s psychological fatigue (“I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired”) and the disturbing vision of his own mortality in the “hoary grass” that beckons us toward an allegory of the classic existential dilemma, the basic question of the purpose of our lives: What have I lived my life for, i.e., beyond mere survival?

  Some critics have followed their noses elsewhere, for example Irving Howe’s critique of Richard’s Poirier’s excellent book, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, which Howe reviewed for the New York Times:

Poirier reads. “After Apple-Picking” as a poem about Frost’s weariness with writing poetry (“I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired”). Since the poem depicts the experience of satiety, it is at least possible that Poirier’s extension of reference is legitimate. But why should we want it? Why should not Frost’s own terms, the concrete, sensuous experience of apple-picking, be sufficient for this wonderful reflection on the price of being done in and undone?^[4]

Yet, to selectively read the text as Howe and find “the concrete, sensuous experience of apple-picking” a “wonderful reflection on the price of being done in and undone,” or to venture into the meta-poetic analysis which Howe erroneously imputes to Poirier [n.b., “After Apple-Picking” was published in 1914, relatively soon after Frost had obtained publication of his first book in Britain, and therefore it was unlikely that Frost was weary of poetry], or to limit the poem to a discourse on impending retirement or death, would be to engage in a reading that is banal at best, since any one of these eschews an inquiry into the psychological unrest evident in Frost’s figurations. It is not so much that “we want” to extend the references in the poem’s stranger elements, particularly those that don’t jibe with the “concrete, sensuous experience of apple-picking,” but that, as Poirier’s book maintains, the specific expression of the poem demands it. The common mistake that readers and critics have made with Frost’s work is to read metaphor and symbol out of the poetry and attempt to render it as stark realism. It is Frost’s ulteriority, often revealed through the unconventional use of familiar poetic figurations, that compels us to explore the agons inherent in his work, otherwise we’d have very few reasons to return to the poems as often as we do.

  If there is an “experience of satiety” in “After Apple-Picking,” it is one that “overtired” doesn’t square with. Frost’s apple-picker, a man of the twentieth century, appears to be exhibiting the spiritual ennui of the existentialist, complete with visions, hallucinations and troubled sleep. In this respect, Frost finds common ground with similar themes in the work of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and other artists and thinkers of his time. And Frost’s interest in exfoliating internal conflict in “After Apple-Picking” is not an isolated case, for psychic dilemmas are readily exploited to shape the perceptions of his narrative personas in other poems like “The Wood-Pile,” “Storm Fear,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Neither Far Out Nor In Deep.” With regard to the psychological dramas in Frost’s work, Lentricchia observes:

One of the severest lessons of Frost’s poetry is that although the mind may close out a world dangerous to psychic balance, it may as well, when divided against itself, enclose experiences that are potentially fatal to mental serenity. In Frost’s pastoral world, where overt violence from without is a minimal consideration, the self may turn inward in its freedom from externally generated tensions, often to discover and confront threats from interior demons far more difficult to control than those of our public experience.^[5]

Certainly, the existential angst of “Desert Places” confirms this:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

  We are inextricably bound by the facts that compose our existence, but these facts may also imply a “mythological or symbolic statement,” as Poirier puts it:

When at the very outset the apple-picker remembers “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree,” he is, without any self-consciousness, committed by “natural facts” to a mythological or symbolic statement, as he is immediately thereafter in the further “fact” that the ladder is pointing “toward heaven still.” “Heaven” is not the destination awaiting anyone who climbs ladders, but it can become part of his consciousness of destinations.^[6]

As the literary midwives to any reading of mythology, allegory and symbolism serve to deepen the significance of the apple-picker’s dilemma. Thus, in “After Apple-Picking,” we have a “two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” “apple-picking,” a “pane of glass” (that is in fact a sheet of ice), “hoary grass,” and an unwelcome “dream” that will “trouble” the narrator’s “sleep.”  Using these tropes Frost transports us between two kinds of dreams: the mythical dream of Heaven and the mortal dream of Earth. Our first inkling of an existential meditation comes after the introductory eight lines, where the narrator relates this waking nightmare:

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.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.

The pane of ice is a “glass” and so another kind of lens, one that nature itself provides; with it the speaker sees “the world of hoary grass,” this phrase being a convenient way of referring to the mortality of all living things: the hoary grass goes dormant, the human “sleeps.”^[7] Hence the “strangeness” seen through the lens of ice naturally gives way to the haunting impressions of the dream of Earth without the gloss of divine myth. The catalyst for this vision of death could be advanced age, though the narrator doesn’t tell us that; instead, it seems that his spiritual torpor precedes and is most likely the cause of his vision (“But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell”).

  In Symbolism and American Literature, Charles Feidelson, Jr. writes, “it is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.” The symbol, in contrast, offers something that speaks to our sensibilities; it is continuous in time and transcends analytic thought while suggesting the unconventional, the novel, the disorderly and potentially dangerous.^[8]  A symbol is also inherently paradoxical as, for example, Melville’s white whale or Hawthorne’s scarlet letter.

  Frost’s narrator seems to be caught between these two spheres (the spiritual and material worlds) where his actions take on an allegorical dimension while he interacts with symbolic objects, such as the ladder or the apples.  The dreams of Heaven and Earth blend in “magnified” hallucinations of apples in all states of being (“Stem end and blossom end / And every fleck of russet showing clear”) and auditory hallucinations (“And I keep hearing from the cellar bin / The rumbling sound / Of load on load of apples coming in”). The symbolic support for belief, the ladder (which many commentators have associated with “Jacob’s Ladder” from the Biblical account of Jacob’s dream at Bethel^[9]) is the bridge between Heaven and Earth. The ladder is “two-pointed” and has a dual purpose, like allegory itself, in uniting these two dreams. Though depicted as pointing “Toward Heaven still,” the ladder is unstable; the speaker says he feels “the ladder sway as the boughs bend,” and there is an “ache” in his “instep arch,” illustrating with customary Frostian brilliance the painstaking effort required to maintain the difficult balance of the combined dreams of Heaven and Earth. The fact that the ladder is pointing “Toward Heaven still” may well reflect the narrator’s own incredulousness at the persistence of hope. The significance of these religious symbols cannot be underestimated in Frost’s work: “I was brought up a Swedenborgian. I am not a Swedenborgian now. But there’s a good deal of it that’s left with me. I’m a mystic. I believe in symbols.”^[10]

  Though Frost’s narrator reaches for a type of Emersonian transcendence in “ten thousand thousand fruit to touch / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,” there is no final deliverance:

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.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

The “fruit” that fall to earth, even if “not bruised or spiked with stubble,” are in the end “As of no worth,” recalling “for dust you are and to dust you will return.” By employing the fundamental symbolism of Genesis, Frost’s allegory says there can be no satisfactory escape from our discomfiting existential dilemma. One can only reflexively withdraw into “sleep,” a temporary or permanent suspension of the agon represented by our waking nightmares, hence a resolution without satiety or peace. This instinctive withdrawal is flagged by the apple-picker’s fanciful reference to Punxsutawney Phil, an ironic evasion that reminds us of Randall Jarrell’s commentary on Frost’s work:

And so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily subtle and strange, poems which express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about it; and if there were, would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from have seldom been stated with such bare composure.^[11]

  But this evasion has a salutary purpose, for the ironic consciousness functions as a safety valve that defends us against our daily confrontation with reality and its continued reminders of our mortality.  Lentricchia writes:

The poet’s mind becomes, as I.A Richards noted some time ago, a touchstone of psychological fitness; what the poet needs to create is emblematic of what is needed by the rest of us in our transactions with the everyday world.  It is “everybody’s sanity . . . to live by form,” as Frost put it in his “Letter to The Amherst Student.” A poetic act of imagination is typically seen in Frost as a building of formal structures of enclosures–he takes his metaphor seriously–the erecting of a “room” for the mind to withdraw to.

Yet Frost insists in his poetics that aesthetic enclosures be not too well shielded from the light of ordinary reality; that however much we may need to be rescued from ourselves and our world, we had better stay in contact, via an ironic consciousness, lest we slip away never to return.^[12]

  The apple-picker’s fatigue and hallucinations are akin to the symptoms of neurasthenia (albeit in a less debilitating form) which Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer described in Studies on Hysteria, where a “splitting of the consciousness” occurs as a result of psychic repression of some trauma or ideation which ultimately leads to a “hypnoid” state” or “amnesia of defense.”^[13] The ironic sense of humor affected by the poem’s narrator indicates an awareness that something is wrong, but the difference between a regular “human” sleep and death doesn’t seem to trouble him. So the root of the ailment remains obscured when untreated:

If a somatic symptom is caused by an idea and is repeatedly set going by it, we should expect that intelligent patients capable of self-observation would be conscious of the connection; they would know by experience that the somatic phenomenon appeared at the same time as the memory of a particular event. The underlying causal nexus is, it is true, unknown to them; but all of us always know what the idea is which makes us cry or laugh or blush, even though we have not the slightest understanding of the nervous mechanism of these ideogenic phenomena. Sometimes patients do really observe the connection and are conscious of it. For instance, a woman may say that her mild hysterical attack (trembling and palpitations, perhaps) comes from some great emotional disturbance and is repeated when, and only when, some event reminds her of it. But this is not the case with very many or indeed the majority of hysterical symptoms. Even intelligent patients are unaware that their symptoms arise as the result of an idea and regard them as physical phenomena on their own account. If it were otherwise the psychical theory of hysteria must already have reached a respectable age.^[14]

  That Frost was acutely aware of the existence of such psychological conditions and their consequences is evident in poems like “The Hill Wife” and “After Apple Picking,” where the self’s mythic image is confronted by life’s mortal realities. The youth and innocence of the “hill wife” – who is fashioned in the image of a modern Madame Bovary –  is pitted against the haunting drudgery of domesticity on the twentieth century farm, which lacks both the social milieu and romantic attachments that would have made her life tolerable, and these circumstances eventually cause her to abandon her home and commit suicide. The apple-picker’s soliloquy similarly reveals feelings of lost purpose, on both material and spiritual levels, with consequent hallucinatory experiences and an overwhelming sense of listlessness. Both cases appear to fit within Freud and Breuer’s spectrum of neurasthenia.

  The raising of Freud’s specter leaves one strain in our reading undeveloped, which concerns the lack of a sexual component to the apple-picker’s malaise. If Adam is overtaxed by his psychic burdens, no Eve is present to ease his pain.  A Freudian interpretation might go so far as to use the representations of the ladder, the apples and the sensation of apple-picking as symbols of sexuality.  But unlike the erotic images in “Birches” (“Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before them over their heads to dry in the sun”) — a poem that also reflects back on a life lived — all traces of a feminine presence seem purposely avoided in “After Apple-Picking.” The apple-picker has no one to share his harvest with, thus the absence of a companion seems a particularly haunting one in this poem. Ironically, this leads us back to Bashō in “deep autumn,” suddenly thinking about his neighbor and discovering his own isolation.

____________________

[a] Some alternative translations are the following: “deep autumn / what does my neighbor do?” (Stephen Wolfe); “It is late autumn / I wonder what my neighbors / Will be doing now?” (Daniel C. Buchanan); and “Autumn deepens / The man next door, what does he do / for a living?” (Makoto Ueda). Stephen Wolfe provides a fascinating commentary and other translations at http://haikureality.theartofhaiku.com/esejeng115.htm.

[1]  Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Duke Univ. Press 1975), p. 48.

[2] Ibid. at 72.

[3]  Genesis 3:17-19, New International Version.

[4]  Irving Howe, “The Poet of Home,” New York Times, October 30, 1977.

[5] Lentricchia at 60.

[6]  Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (Stanford Univ. Press 1990), p.293-299. Poirier reads the poem as “a dream vision, and from the outset it proposes that only labor can penetrate to the essential facts of natural life.” While certainly a “dream vision,” I find no textual support in the poem for the corollary regarding labor’s purpose and effect as Poirier particularly sees it. In fact, the poem describes a ceasing of a particular kind of labor, apple-picking, and this has implications that affect the emotional well-being of the apple-picker. In my reading, I find the apple-picker’s dilemma is a sense of purposelessness that neither labor nor its opposite can adequately address.

Frost maintained that a metaphor was the basis of each of his poems, and Poirier follows this lead very well, particularly in reference to the poem’s mythic elements: “To speak of apples is to speak of the Fall and the discovery of the benefits from it that both require and repay human toil.” But with his focus on “human toil” Poirier misses the Fall’s connection to mortality. For example, when discussing the poem’s “hoary grass” image:

This grass could be real, “hoary” in the sense that it is coated white with morning frost; or it could be other-worldly grass, “hoary” in the sense of “ancient,” part of a mythic world derived from the Bible and Milton. We are not to decide which is which; we are instead meant to equivocate. The larger possibilities are made inextricable in our, and in his, experience from smaller, more detailed ones. Thus, “essence” can mean something abstract, like an attribute, or even a spirit that is fundamental to winter nights, and it is also something very specific to apple-picking, the perfume of a harvest.   Ibid. at p. 297.

Poirier appears to overlook the classic literary symbolism of grass as a figure of mortality, and hence he does not connect the dots to a theme that would offer an explanation for the narrator’s discomfiting psychology, indeed one for which narrative equivocation may have literary purpose.

[7] See, e.g., Section 6 of  “Song of Myself” from  Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman:

A child said   What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and  remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

[8]  Charles Feidelson, Jr., Symbolism and American Literature (Univ. of Chicago Press 1953), p. 8

[9]  Even before Freud, we knew that any reference to a dream or vision (at least in literary works) signals the disclosure of important information, for example in Frost’s intuitive reference to Jacob’s dream (which itself is the subject of conflicting interpretations; see, e.g., the commentary provided by the Faculty of Jewish Scholars at Bar-Ilan University’s website: https://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/vayetze/harlap.html).

[10]  Henry Hart, The Life of Robert Frost (John Wiley & Sons 2017), p. 19.  “One of the tenets of Swedenborgian doctrine was, as Emerson explained: ‘The physical world was purely symbolic of the spiritual world.’ The world was, in other words, like a book; when properly interpreted its symbols gave one insight into the divine author and his creation.”

[11]  Randall Jarrell, “The Other Frost,” Poetry & The Age (Alfred A. Knopf 1953), p. 30.

[12]  Lentricchia at 73-74 [quoting in part Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Latham (New York 1966), p. 107.]

[13]  See Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895), PFL iii 51-69. See also Sigmund Freud, The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense (1896).

[14]  Ibid.

© 2017 Steven M. Critelli