¶ … Metaphor
The two poems "After Apple Picking," and "Birches," are among Frost's best works in terms of poetic imagination and meaning. These works are somewhat discomfiting, for they make use of simple and every-day experiences to address the idea of one's final end, and in so doing not only allow the calm of everyday affairs to infiltrate the reader's thoughts of death, but also allow the gloom of death to pervades their consideration of these mundane events. Both of these poems talk about death using a central metaphor to try to make the unimaginable imaginable; the first speaks of the act of death as descending to sleep after a long day in an orchard, while the second considers the possibility of near-death or reincarnation as comparable to the childhood art of swinging birches.
In "After Apple Picking," Frost's narrator professes to be descending from a hard day picking apples. However, that he speaks more of metaphorical than of literal work is evident in his choice of words, such as referring to his ladder as leading "Toward heaven still..." The mythical impact of his story is heightened by using biblical imagery through-out the poem, both in the reference to the ladder to heaven, and when he speaks of the "the great harvest" (a biblical term for the final judgment). Another such reference is " looking through a pane of glass," which is a direct paraphrase of the Pauline/platonic...
That he has broken the pane through which he sees the world indicates his death. The Shakespearan reference (from Hamlet) as to what dreams will come to trouble his sleep also indicates that the narrator faces death, which is above all a "long sleep." Yet he does not speak directly of death, but hides its presence within the extended metaphor of retiring from apple-picking. In this metaphor, the apples themselves, which have been carefully collected or which have slipped through his fingers to be lost forever, represent experiences which have been embraced or missed. This is made clear in the way he speaks of cherishing and touching each "in hand." These experiences cannot continue forever, though, as he grows tired. He is descending from the tree and bringing the apples home to the cellar, which represents ending one's life and in the "great harvest" presenting one's final life review to God. At the very end, however, though he was originally certain he did not care about the few missed apples, he begins to be troubled by the thought of having passed over so much and consigning it now to the realm of the impossible. He ends his poem, as he will end his life, with a bittersweet uncertainty.
In "Birches," a similar over-arching metaphor is at work. In this work, the reader does not have to dig so deeply to get at…
