Birches & After Apple-Picking

Frost’s poem “Birches” evokes a Vermont winter landscape in a remote corner of a deciduous forest. The ice storm conjures in the speaker’s mind events from his boyhood when he used to climb up into the top branches of birch trees and swing down on them all the way to the ground. His recollection leads the speaker to meditate on the difficulties in life that might cause him to lose heart; to get through those moments he’d like to be a swinger of birches again. He then meditates on love, and finally on his own death.

The blank verse poem is historically well-suited to sustain a meditation, for the iambic pentameter drives the train of thought forward while the absence of any formal rhyme scheme allows the speaker an almost unlimited degree of freedom to pursue associations and the assonances they suggest. The speaker takes as his starting point the image of birch trees bent low under the weight of the ice, an image which he transforms through his musings on childhood, love, and death.

In Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” we see an apple orchard after harvest time and all the paraphernalia necessary to the task: ladder, barrel, cider press. The speaker is exhausted from the effort and all he wants to do is sleep, or perhaps hibernate, or then again maybe just sleep, for his labor has set him apart from the animal kingdom (woodchuck).

One of Michelangelo’s sonnets comes to mind where all the artist wants to do is sleep. He has been up for days, working, completely immersed in the labor of active creation, and now he is dead tired and wishes to be left in peace. Nothing can rouse him. Frost taps into the topos of the artist exhausted after his creative exertions, hoping only to sleep. That sleep is probably not identical to the brute hibernation of the woodchuck, or by synecdoche of the entire animal kingdom, for his creativity has made the poet more human.