ROBERT FROST AND THE FUN IN HOW YOU SAY A THING 121or mundane: “through a tree / Toward heaven”; “two or three / Apples.” Just
so, American folk art blends beauty with local use.
A fall poem—not a happy season for Frost, or Keats—with apples falling
smacks of Eden’s apple that brought toil, seasons, death into the world. It ’s after
the harvest, life is lapsing. And why a two-pointed ladder, unless this poem has
in store some doubleness, ambiguity, contradiction? A ladder left pointing, an
unfilled barrel, an unpicked bough trouble his resolute “ButI am done with
apple-picking now.”
Now we learn it ’s nighttime, toward winter. Rough-joined syntax brings on
a fitful recollection of his morning’s vision.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.“Essence,” “scent,” “drowsing”: a dreamlike drift. Then a run-on sentence
drifts across the breaks—“sight [that] I got,” “glass [that] I skimmed”—in
a spellbound replay: “I cannot rub... I got from looking... I skimmed...
And held... and I let it fall.” He sees darkly through “a pane of glass” (or
film of ice), his strange window on things before it falls and breaks. Not one
of your crisp New England Thanksgivings, but a moment of strange deep
vision.
We lapse into an uneasy dream of nature ’s plenty driven by short lines, er-
ratic rhymes, surreal detail.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.A dream’s keenness touches flecks of russet and the ladder rung, yet things
sway and bend in hypnotic pulse: “appear and disappear, / Stem end and blos-
som end.” He ’s half asleep before the pane has fallen.
From that drowse, the next passage turns subterranean, foreboding.