“After Apple-Picking” deepens the questions and fears raised in “Mowing,” as it, too, weds fact and dream in a precarious drama of uncertainty. The exhaustion and acceptance of limits in the pursuit of perfection spur the speaker’s meditation on desire and waste. Here, as in “Mowing,” an irregular rhyme scheme draws the reader forward but underscores the sense of uncertainty and swaying, as do the brilliantly varied line lengths such as “But I was well/Upon my way to sleep before it fell,/And I could tell/What form my dreaming was about to take.” The repetition of sleep four times in the final five lines, as well as the pointed rhyme of the final word “sleep” with “heap,” adds to the ominousness with which the poem concludes. The image of apple-picking invokes the fall of man through desire and knowledge, and the ladder recalls the biblical story of Jacob’s dream of ascending and descending angels, as well as his wrestling with the angel of God. The word “heaven” in the second line is perhaps the only overt indication in the poem that this day’s labor has something to do with the desire to find God or attain grace through labor in the world, a desire doomed to failure because of the inescapable limits of creaturely natures. The ladder had also become a figure for the scale of nature and the possibility of human progress. Swaying as it does in “After Apple-Picking” against the tree, it gives us a sense of man’s precarious position in a vast, nearly inexhaustible world that grows and wastes, in which some are selected and others go to “the cider-apple heap/As of no worth.” What may “trouble” the speaker’s “human” sleep is that it serves no purpose other than to keep him on the ladder in pursuit of perfection, unlike the woodchuck, whose long sleep has at least preserved him in the safety of hibernation.

The fact of waste in creation is something Frost wanted to accept as both the joy and sadness of existence on earth. The motions of such a world do not imply progress but variations within cycles of growth and decay and competition—even among seemingly innocent forms—for a place in the sun.

In “After Apple-Picking” and in “Birches” (as well as “Wild Grapes”), the trees of life and of knowledge combine in a garden that never was and never will be perfect. Moments of skillful play are the best way to create, as he called it, “a momentary stay against confusion.” In “Birches,” the speaker, “weary of considerations,” dreams of such a momentary stay through the boyhood memory of swinging on birch trees. The boy climbs only “Toward heaven,” letting go and returning to earth because “Earth’s the right place for love.” And even though he knows how imperfect love can be—from the excesses of cruelty, selfishness, and desire—he admits, “I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Frost expresses both the power and limitations of art in the concluding line “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” As a poet, one has rarely done better.