As with many of Robert Frost's poems, nature is an important part of the setting and the activity performed in nature creates an opportunity for what is usually an allegorical message. As with "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken," Frost imbues an ordinary event (such as walking in the woods of traveling home) with deeper significance by suggesting that the event is somehow symbolic of a larger picture. Those...
As with many of Robert Frost's poems, nature is an important part of the setting and the activity performed in nature creates an opportunity for what is usually an allegorical message. As with "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken," Frost imbues an ordinary event (such as walking in the woods of traveling home) with deeper significance by suggesting that the event is somehow symbolic of a larger picture. Those two poems offer the description of short journeys as somehow emblematic of life's longer journey and the choices made.
"After Apple Picking" is even more allegorical than these two, since it portrays an activity that embodies the cycle of living: picking apples at the time of harvest, realizing some apples are left unpicked, but that the task is finished. The narrator is weary ("drowsing off" he says, and "I am overtired") and refers to sleep a number of times, referring to a woodchuck hibernating and then to "some human sleep" which may refer to death. The narrator is neither dreaming nor dying, but ruminating on the process of living and the thoughts people have as they contemplate the end of their lives. The apples represent the many experiences the narrator has had in life, some good, some bad, and some in between ("went surely to the cider-heap as if no worth"), and finally realizes there is peace in acceptance of one's death that will come eventually.
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