Summary

“After Apple-Picking” opens immediately with the results of the speaker’s apple-picking endeavors. There seems to remain much more to be done: “there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill … and there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough” (1-5). However, the speaker resigns himself to this unfinished state, deciding “But I am done with apple-picking now” (6). He feels the “Essence of winter sleep” overpowering him and begins “drowsing off” (7-8).

The temporality of the poem then shifts when the speaker recalls an event he experienced earlier in the “morning” (11). He recounts taking a “pane of glass” – presumably a sheet of ice – from the “drinking trough,” and looking through it at the “world of hoary grass” (10-12). But the sheet of ice meets an immediately violent end for which the speaker is partly responsible: “It melted, and...