My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still, / And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 5)

Importance: These lines open “After Apple-Picking” and are important because they establish the poem’s setting in an apple orchard and the unnamed first-person speaker. These lines also establish the central tension of the poem: though the environment of the apple orchard is set up with the necessary means for the speaker to succeed in his apple picking endeavors – “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree,” “a barrel that I didn’t fill,” and “two or three Apples I didn’t pick,” the speaker still feels a sense of unfulfillment originating from himself. He decides, “But I am done with apple-picking now,” in the face of his biological limitations, the...