Mortality

Throughout “After Apple-Picking,” the speaker is plagued by an intense sense of unfulfillment and impossibility in relation to his apple-picking endeavors. At the beginning of the poem, the opportunity represented by “a barrel that I didn’t fill” and the “two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough” remains unfulfilled because of inevitable biological factors (3, 4-5). The speaker explains that the “Essence of winter sleep is on the night,” with the phrase “winter sleep” especially emphasizing the periodic, scheduled, cyclical, and inevitable need for rest (7). The irony is that while nature and biology provide a great bounty for all human endeavors – represented, for example, by the “two or three/Apples” – it simultaneously limits the individual capacity to make full use of that bounty. Paradoxically, the speaker’s endeavors are also constrained by the natural but strict requirements of his own biological clock, which...