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Literary Analysis Of After Apple-Picking

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"After Apple-picking" is one of the greatest of nature lyrics in English poetry. This poem brings out the poet 's enjoyment of the scenes, slights, sounds and scents of nature. It is, on the other hand, a reverie or monologue of exhausted apple-picker. The setting is of course North of Boston, but the poet succeeded in rising from the particular to the general and universal. It embodies a universal experience and as Lynen rightly puts it. It is not necessary to know New England to be able to enjoy the lyric. "After Apple-Picking" is a poem that defies any categorisation. It is neither a dramatic narrative nor a thought-provoking philosophical poem. If at all, one must classify and categorise the poem, it would be aptest to call it a nature-lyric. The poem begins with a description of the apple-picker who has stuck his two-pointed ladder through a tree and although there may be two or three barrels that he has not filled and although there may be two or three apples which he didn’t pick from some bought, yet he does not want to do apple-picking any longer. He is not only fed up of apple-picking, but the scent of the picked apples has induced sleep into him. He feels he cannot work even if he desires to, "To him all familiar objects of nature …show more content…

The task of apple-picking, it is suggested, is any task, it is life. The drowsiness which the speaker feels after the completion of the task is associated with the cycle of the seasons.it is special character is emphasized by a bit of magic, even though is whimsical: Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass 10 I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break" (Tilak, 2010,

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