Fundoo Times
'After Apple Picking' by Robert Frost is a delightful poem related to harvest season and is suitable to be included in the poetry collection for Thanksgiving.

After Apple-Picking

The blissful and joyous festival of Thanksgiving is celebrated on the 4th Thursday in the month of November, every year. This special day gives every American to thank the Lord for his blessings and keeping them in good health, by granting abundant harvest, year after year. Celebrations are in full swing as the entire America infuses into party and gala mood. While it is typical to receive plenty of poems on Christmas, but reciting a poem on a holiday like Thanksgiving can bring surprise and delight on the faces of your loved ones. The poem "After Apple-Picking", written by the eminent poet Robert Frost, not just emphasizes on the concept of the harvesting festival, but also brings forward the experiences of life, including regrets and mistakes. Plus, the approach of winter makes one feel the presence of mortality. Robert Frost narrates his story after being extremely tired of picking apples from the orchards.

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.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
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
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.
But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing dear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.