The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Frost, Robert. “After Apple-Picking” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking.

Noe that all parenthetical citations throughout this guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Born in 1874, Robert Frost was an American writer known for his poetry on rural nineteenth-century New England. He is known for his insertion of weighty philosophical contemplation into poetry whose subject matter, at a surface level, focuses on the small moments of the supposed simplicity and even banality of rural New England life. Frost was widely honored for his poetry during his lifetime – he won four Pulitzer Prizes, received a Congressional Gold Medal, and became poet laureate of Vermont two years before his death in 1963. Frost’s poems remain popular to this day, the most famous of which is "The Road Not Taken," a meditation that connects human choice to the seemingly simple task of choosing a path to walk in the woods.

“After Apple-Picking” is a famous poem from Frost’s second collection of poetry, North of Boston, first published in London in 1914. The poems in the collection, including “After Apple-Picking,” draw on the rural themes for which Frost is best known. They feature brief vignettes of rural New England life that expand into vast philosophical meditations. Specifically in the case of “After Apple-Picking,” the poem begins with an account of its speaker’s drowsiness after a day spent apple picking but quickly expands into a complex meditation on the nature of sleep, dreaming, and the progression through life towards death.