This paper examines two of Robert Frost's most celebrated poems, "After Apple Picking" and "Birches," focusing on how each employs a central extended metaphor to make death imaginable through ordinary experience. In "After Apple Picking," the narrator's descent from a long day's labor serves as a sustained metaphor for dying, enriched by biblical and Shakespearean allusions. In "Birches," the childhood pastime of swinging on birch trees becomes a vehicle for expressing the longing to escape death and be reborn into innocence. Together, the poems demonstrate Frost's characteristic technique of grounding profound existential themes in concrete, rural imagery.
The paper models comparative close reading: it treats two poems as case studies for the same literary device and shows how each poet handles that device differently in tone and implication. Rather than summarizing plot, it unpacks how word choices, images, and allusions collaborate to produce meaning — a core skill in literary analysis.
The paper opens with a dual thesis establishing what both poems share (death through metaphor) and how they differ (sleep vs. rebirth). It then devotes a sustained paragraph to each poem, moving from surface narrative to symbolic reading. The conclusion is embedded within the "Birches" analysis, where Frost's ambivalent symbols are shown to simultaneously embody hope and futility. The structure mirrors the poems' own movement from certainty to bittersweet ambiguity.
The two poems After Apple Picking and Birches are among Robert Frost's best works in terms of poetic imagination and meaning. These works are somewhat discomfiting, for they make use of simple, everyday experiences to address the idea of one's final end. In doing so, they not only allow the calm of ordinary affairs to infiltrate the reader's thoughts of death, but also allow the gloom of death to pervade consideration of these mundane events. Both poems speak about death using a central metaphor to make the unimaginable imaginable: the first presents the act of dying 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 pastime of swinging on birches.
In After Apple Picking, Frost's narrator professes to be descending from a hard day's work in the orchard. That he speaks more of metaphorical than of literal labor is evident in his choice of words — for instance, his reference to his ladder as leading "toward heaven still." The mythical weight of his story is heightened by biblical imagery throughout the poem, both in the image of the ladder to heaven and in his mention of "the great harvest," a biblical term for the final judgment.
Another such allusion appears in the image of "looking through a pane of glass," a direct echo of the Pauline idea — familiar also from Platonic epistemology — that in life we see through glass dimly, but after death we will see clearly. That the narrator has broken the pane through which he views the world signals his death. The Shakespearean reference, drawn from Hamlet's meditation on what dreams may trouble one's sleep, further confirms that the narrator faces death — understood above all as a "long sleep."
Yet the narrator does not speak directly of death; he conceals its presence within the extended metaphor of retiring from apple-picking. In this metaphor, the apples themselves — carefully collected or slipped through his fingers to be lost forever — represent experiences that have been embraced or missed. This is made clear in the way he speaks of cherishing and touching each one "in hand." These experiences cannot continue indefinitely, however, as he grows weary. His descent from the tree, bringing the apples home to the cellar, represents the ending of one's life and, in the "great harvest," the presentation of a final life review before God.
At the very end, though he was originally certain he did not grieve over the few missed apples, he begins to be troubled by how much has passed him by and has now been consigned to the realm of the impossible. He ends his poem, as he will end his life, with a bittersweet uncertainty.
Though he himself is not so innocent anymore, and comprehends that the woods of reality are far darker than he had imagined them as a child, he would nonetheless like to go back to that innocence and "escape." The symbols of the birches simultaneously represent the futility of such a hope — after all, they are now bent and have no more spring to lift one skyward and back — and the possibility that such a thing might still be. Like After Apple Picking, Birches closes on Frost's characteristic note: an honest, unresolved ambivalence about mortality that neither denies its weight nor surrenders entirely to despair.
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