Robert Frost “After Apple-Picking” Poem Animation Movie
Heres a virtual movie of Robert Frost reading one of his best known poems “After Apple-Picking”.
In “After Apple-Picking” written in 1914 Frost takes an ordinary experience and transforms it into a meditative moment, a philosophical musing. Apple-picking slides gradually away from merely harvesting fruit to considering how life has been experienced fully but with some regrets and mistakes. The reference to winter coming on feels like the presence of mortalilty. The question about what kind of sleep to anticipate suggests untroubled oblivion or possibly some kind of new life just as the woodchuck reawakens to fresh life in the spring after his hibernation.
“After Apple-Picking”…………
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 clear.
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.
Kind Regards
Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2008
Duration : 0:1:56
Apple Picking (Video)
You want to see an entire apple picking experience? Presented by Oragon Video Productions.
Duration : 0:10:24
Apple Picking ~ Parlee Farm
Picking Apples, looking at the pumpkins and running around the hay stack maze is good fun at Parlee Farm
Duration : 0:3:4
apple picking technique
Ribston Pippin are supposed to be picked early October, but this is not always so. You must pick apples when they are ready, not when the book says. On 30th August we noticed they were falling freely and separating easily, so yesaterday and today picked the whole 20 trees, about 14 boxes of select fruit. The boxes are around 15kg, so thats about 11kg (23 pounds) per tree, which isn’t too bad. These apples weigh 8 or 9 to the kilo, so thats about90 decent apples per tree. As well as that there were about 6 boxes of decent quality fallers and marked apples that will juice for hard cider. You can use fallen apples for sweet (unfermented) cider as long as they are select, washed and you don’t have a lot of animals (for example geese, chickens or pigs) pooping in you orchard due to the risk of salmonella, E Coli 0157 or other potentially dangerous contamination. The risk is probably extremely trivial, but never exactly zero. Fermentation will certainly wipe out any such bugs, but there is a very small risk in unfermented aple huice, which is why I only use picked and washed fruit for juice I am offereing at markets.
Note the picking technique, these apples have a short stallk, this can be tricky as where you have two or three apples touching, if you twist one, the other 2 can fall off. Ideally use both hands to stop this. The classic picking technique is to palm the apple and gently lift or lever away from the angle its growing at, the stalk shjoudl separate withouit pulling off the rest of the fruit spur, whcih is bad as it can destroy next year’s fruit bud (remember the apple pickers in the film of ‘The Cider House Rules?’
many authorities say you should handle apples like eggs. Bruised apples will not store.
Duration : 0:3:18