Apple Orchard

The apple orchard to which the speaker goes on his apple-picking endeavors is the primary setting of the poem. The apple orchard is significant because of how its abundance of choice contrasts with the speaker’s ultimate realization of his lack of personal agency. Though in the speaker’s dream the orchard possesses “ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,” representing an unquantifiable degree of opportunity and possibility, the speaker responds to the orchard’s plentitude with a sense of self-defeat, realizing that “I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired” and that “For all [apples] / That struck the earth, / No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth” (28-29, 30, 32-36). The apple orchard setting is also associated with a sense of duality – the speaker is similarly overcome by tiredness in his waking experience of the...