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Critical analysis of after apple picking by robert frost
Critical analysis of after apple picking by robert frost
After Apple-Picking (Robert Frost
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After Apple Picking
In Frost's poetry any deviation, not only from the iambic foot but from the iambic pentameter line as well, is an important marker of the speaker's state of mind, his control, and his capacity for irony. "After Apple Picking" keeps resolutely returning to pentameter lines, but the speaker is drowsy, and the opening twelve-syllable line - "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree" - is like the last murmured words before sleep. Of course, it also represents, as does the whole masterful structure of the poem, Frost's own precise control of tone, as he creates a speaker who is precariously "upon [his] way to sleep." This fatigued vulnerability manifests itself in an escalating slippage of control from ten-syllable lines to foreshortened lines like "For all / That struck the earth," or eleven-syllable lines like "No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble." And as the speaker moves toward an increasing intuition of the symbolic underpinnings of his exhaustion, which is the result not just of his picking apples but of other more visceral frustrations and fears, the frequency of these variations increases. (Lines 1, 2, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, and 42 vary from the pentameter; only lines 18 and 34 are extra-syllabic.) His awareness and fear of this loss of control are manifested in the final lines:
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
What he fears is not so much death as the very state the poem has mimicked - that is, a suspension between not-life and not-death where language is narcotized toward incoherence and uncontrol.
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Matter . . . makes itself felt even as it capitulates to its own variable nature. If the apple will fall in "After Apple Picking," if it, like the speaker on his way to dreaming, is about to go bruised to the cider heap where it will be pressed into an essence of itself, it nonetheless maintains through all its transmutations an identifiable appleness. The apple holds, against the authoritative prosodic erosion of waking reality into dream state, its own sensual place as an essential ingredient in the spell to which the speaker is succumbing.
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
Because young girls and women around the world are beginning to alter themselves to fit a certain mold, people are starting to realize that a pretty face and one’s youth is a factor that has been hurting the world for many years. So much so that a person is willing to kill to obtain beauty. This is truly and amazing yet sickening fact and the more we emphasize on one’s appearance the more catastrophes like this will happen.
To begin, the use of assonance can be heard in the poem in comparing the context or appearance of the black berries to words. This can be seen in the second line of the poem, “among the fat, overripe, icy, black berries,” where words can also be “fat” as in full of positive or negative meaning, “overripe” as in exaggerated,” and “icy” as in hurtful or cold. Nonetheless, the emphasis in the vowels in the phrase makes it stand out more to the ears of the readers. Another example of assonance can be seen in the eighth line, “fall almost unbidden to my tongue,” where the vowels in “fall” and “unbidden” can be heard. According to this phrase, the speaker compares “the ripest berries” to words, seeing as both “fall” from their tongue, as if the speaker could not control the need to learn more words.
Despite the differences between the characters in the poems, I will also go on to say how the preoccupation with death and violence all seem to stem from the apparently unstable minds of the characters; from the instability brought on by varying emotions such as grief, jealousy, resentment, guilt and madness, and the fact that these emotions may lead to paranoia.
Robert Frost’s intricate meanings are stated in such a way that the reader must dwell so much deeper into the poem than one does when one just reads the poem. The poet has a major theme in all of his poems and that theme is nature. Nature is something that Frost could always relate to. In nature Frost sees life, people, and situations in life. In the poem “After Apple-Picking”, he uses the situation of a man picking an apple as another lesson on life. Picking apples is tedious work where one must observe and pick the ripest apples...
Frost uses different stylistic devices throughout this poem. He is very descriptive using things such as imagery and personification to express his intentions in the poem. Frost uses imagery when he describes the setting of the place. He tells his readers the boy is standing outside by describing the visible mountain ranges and sets the time of day by saying that the sun is setting. Frost gives his readers an image of the boy feeling pain by using contradicting words such as "rueful" and "laugh" and by using powerful words such as "outcry". He also describes the blood coming from the boy's hand as life that is spilling. To show how the boy is dying, Frost gives his readers an image of the boy breathing shallowly by saying that he is puffing his lips out with his breath.
Galveston, first visited by French and Spanish explorers in the 16th and 17th centuries, is located on Galveston Island, a 29-mile strip of land about two miles off the Texas coast and about 50 miles southeast of Houston. The city was named in the late 18th century for the Spanish governor of Louisiana, Bernardo de Galvez. Galveston is a commercial shipping port and, with its warm weather and miles of beaches, has also long been a popular resort. Galveston’s nickname at the time was Oleander City, which was filled with tourist at the time of the disaster.
The banquet goes on as planned until one of Banquo's murderers enters the room. When Macbeth notices the murderer, he shows his guests where he will set, and he tells the murderer that he has blood on his face. The murderer says that the blood must be from Banquo, when he cut his throat. Macbeth compliments the murderer on his throat cutting abilities. Before Macbeth gets too cheerful, the murderer has to break some bad news. The bad news is that Fleance (Banquo's son) has escaped. Macbeth says that he is mow terrified, and double checks with the murderer that Banquo is ab...
James Lind was a Scottish physician, he came up with a theory that citrus fruits cured scurvy. In Lind's day there was no concept of vitamins so they did not know that vitamin C cured scurvy, out of 1900 men, 1400 had died, most of them allegedly from having contracted scurvy. According to Lind, scurvy caused more deaths in the British fleets than French and Spanish arms.
Leukemia like any other cancer is devastating especially when it affects children and especially when they are too young to understand most of what is happening to their bodies. Facts like these are what should be used to motivate researchers and caregivers to help to make the process of treatment and care for patient dealing with disease one that is pleasant and supportive. The research should be taken seriously and it is hoped that in the future a cure can be found and the cause of the disease can be explained. It is also hoped that achievements like those can give families who are coping with disease or who have lost loved ones to the disease can find closure and solace in knowing that other may not have to go through what they have.
As a prelude to an inquiry into thematic elements of the poem, it is first necessary to draw out the importance of Fearing’s use of experimental form. Fearing “adheres” to the conventional use of strophic poetic construction, making use of epigrammatic style, where the seven stanzas separate the lament into isolated combinations and experiments on language and the content suggests each might stand alone as organic entities. Putting these highly-varied units into a single poem reflects on the incoherence of broader theme of death and the response to death, the dirge, as well as the notion that such a broad topic as death contains many sma...
Allusions towards drunkenness, or any drugged like state in general, also play an important role in shaping the poem’s meaning. The use of these allusions effectively enhances the idea that art, or more specifically poetry, can take the mind away and become an almost
Robert Frost's “Birches” is written in blank verse and in mostly consistent iambic pentameter. The dependable rhythm of this poem can be likened to the reliability and purity of a child. This poem is not broken into stanzas, rather it is compact with his message and vivid images. This may be due to the fact that—in addition to Frost's desire for this poem to be read conversationally—the compact nature of this poem is attempting to explain the speaker's thoughts and observations in as little space as possible. “The Road Not Taken” is a poetic quintain consisting of four stanzas with five lines in each stanza. Each quintain's rhyme is a dependable ABAAB scheme. The rhyme scheme is comparable to the petrarchan sonnet and the rhyming couplets appear to provoke a sense of focused reflection. The rhythm of this poem is slightly more challenging. It is written in an iambic tetrame...
...the unclear philosophy of the poem must also be looked at from an open-minded point of view. Applying the explanation of the poem, sentence by sentence to the semi-uncovered descriptions of the phases of life, a whole new story comes into perspective. Once studied and looked at carefully, the uncovering of each statement comes out and everything unclear and metaphorical that Frost writes is a lot easier to understand and see.
There are several death related motifs present in the poem. For instance, the poem opens with a passage from Dante’s Inferno, foreshadowing the theme of death in the poem. The speaker says “I know the voices dying with a dying fall.” He also references Lazarus from the Bible, who was raised from the dead, further developing the death motif. The speaker also seems to be looking back on life, referring to past experiences and his aging, as if he believes his death is imminent. He seems to have an obsession with hiding his age. According to the Psychoanalytic Criticism Chapter, the greater our fear of something is, the greater our obsession becomes (24). The speaker's fear of death has lead him to wear clothes that are fashionable for young people, such as rolling his trousers, and goes to great lengths to cover his age in other ways, such as parting his hair behind to cover a bald spot. The last stanza of the poem has a rather depressing and sad ending, a result of fear of