The True Meaning of Post-Apple Picking Post-apple picking has become so familiar and revered that it is difficult to recognize. strangeness. But it would probably sound familiar anyway; it's an excellent example of how even Frost's very great poems can induce a kind of ease about their deepest intensities. It is a proud poem, as if his very life depended on a refusal to justify himself with any open proof of what he does. The apparent “truth” about the poem is that it is genuinely concerned with the realities of the stated subject. But is this “truth” even residual, if, without thinking about it, we take the risk of weighing down the poem with “more than the truth”? Brower wrote meticulously about its rhythmic form, but he did not allow himself to feel the deeper pulses of his metaphors. There are energies in the poem as well as a dream of potential experience that include but are passionately greater than those recorded in his otherwise useful observation that "From the first lines, apparently neutral remarks are transformed into curious phrases chain-like, rich in final rhymes and echoes of all kinds” until “the memories of waking facts and their sleeping distortions become indistinguishable” (The Poetry of Robert Frost, pp. 24, 25). Once again, “The fact is the sweetest dream that work knows. This is a muscular and active knowledge, not to be confused with Santayana's somewhat too tedious proposition that "the artist is a person willing to dream of reality." Consent is not in question – as if reality offered it to us. What it takes is toil and work, the effort of body and mind necessary to bring anything into existence. Labor, once again, is at once one of the unfortunate consequences of the Fall...... middle of paper ...... is at first like an unfortunate infusion of the timid Frost - one of these appeals to a self-deprecating irony that sometimes reveals his particular embarrassment at the power of his own sincerity. But the sentence is saved from bad faith, barely, by the "fact" that, in his state of fatigue, the apple picker could actually wish for a sleep equivalent to the hibernation of a marmot rather than a "sleep human ". His sleep will be human precisely because it will be a disturbed sleep, consumed by dreams and myths. Human sleep is more than animal sleep precisely because it is hampered by memories of what it means to pick apples. After this famous picking in the garden, human life, waking or sleeping, was only a dream, and the words are compacted with the myths we dreamed about the fall and redemption of souls..