Drink Deep With Parched Ears: reconsidering a line from Robert Frost

Winning awards isn't a measure of greatness per se though it measures a specific kind of greatness in a particular arena. There are too many extraordinary films that never would or will win an Oscar because they don't seek to compete in Oscarnality. And the same could be said for any number of other fields of prize and competition. Are "losers" of Nobel Peace prizes somehow less useful than the winners? Or are the nameless ones at the coal face of conflict (or supporting the ones at the coal face) less worthy?

I only mention this to say that Robert Frost is a poet worth reading. And Robert Frost has also won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry. I don't think those things need to be hitched together. He is regularly voted "America's Favorite Poet" but the vast majority of folks in America only know him for his most famous poem "The Road Less Traveled" which is mistitled for most people as "The Road Not Taken." A worthy poem for sure but one that gets read in a very particular valedictory way in the United States but not in the rest of the English speaking world.

For an excellent reflection on the history of that poem and the unique way that poem has entered American culture and how it became to be so well loved I can only deeply commend the book "The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves..." by the excellent poetry critic and writer David Orr.

But there is more to Robert Frost than his one big hit and his other ones that landed like "Nothing Gold Can Stay" or "Birches" or "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," all good poems. So many skillful and wonderful poems with joyfully confounding questions and artisanal crafting of phrases can be found in the backpages of Frost. And recently I was reminded of one of these lesser stars by a poetry critic I have come to admire - John Skoyles.

So here is the poem...take a read and speak it out loud if you can manage!

"After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

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.

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.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

-------

I certainly could write a word or two about what I think is worth consideration in this poem but I have to bend and defer to a wiser man - John Skoyles - who has written poetry, written about poetry and has been the editor of the poetry journal Ploughshares for a long time. But it isn't solely his longevity. Skoyles refined my ears by his observation. His seasoned ear focused in on a line that is easy to pass by in the last quarter of the poem.

"I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired"

Here is what John Skoyles had to say about these ten words, a mere 3.5% of the words in the poem:

"I think this is one of the greatest lines of poetry of all time. This line, really a line and a half, is from After Apple Picking by Robert Frost, the American poet. What I love about this line is its strong statement of resignation. It is almost a confession. The speaker has just finished harvesting apples on his farm, leaving only "two or three apples I didn't pick upon some bough." You'd expect he'd be happy with the result, and we're surprised when he says that he is depleted by his effort. He is "overtired."

The statement is convincing because it comes in the form of a rhymed couplet. The end words are "overtired" and "desired." But there is more. It is not only the last syllable of each word that rhymes, but the final two syllables- a double rhyme. This makes the statement dramatically emphatic. It stands out all the more because the rhymes in the rest of the poem are simple. For example "much" and "touch" surround the couplet I have singled out. So when this double rhyme arrives, it delivers a double impact. Also, the lines focus intensely on the self - the speaker of the poem - the word "myself" is not really to this sense. It could easily have been written as, "I am overtired of the great harvest I desired." But that line is bland compared to the inclusion of "myself." That word points a finger at the speaker in a forceful way. It is almost self-accusatory. He has desired too much and exhausted himself overly. The same is true of the adjective "great." Adding the adjective does two things. It shows the significance of the "I" in comparison and also shows that the harvest of "ten thousand thousand fruit" might be ridiculously gluttonous.

The woodchuck who appears at the poem's ending has the answer to the question about sleep. In comparison to our speaker, the woodchuck has stayed within the limits of his life. His "long sleep" comes naturally. Not from wanting too much and the consequences of attaining it, becoming "overtired." This also hints at being fatigued by having lived his life in a certain way, and not just from the chore of picking apples. Here's the line once more : "I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired"

This kind of analysis is so vital because it invites the listener to not only listen again and again but to place the double rhymed couplet in an ecology with the rhymes around it and show how they have a different effect than the "simple" ones. Not better, but in a relational tension with them. In a similar way one appreciates a well placed triple entendre that is also a pun! I think Skoyles is inviting a thrilling lateral skill to try to employ when coming across a line or two that just marries the shape of your ear for some reason. Listen again. More than once. Feel where your tongue has to push off your teeth or the bursts of air and how those echo - or don't- from the ecology of sounds and words around them. These effects can be as much as part of "the meaning" of the poem as narrative summary of it too.

Drink deep with your parched ears.