The True Meaning of After the Apple HarvestAfter the Apple Harvest has become so familiar and revered that it is difficult to recognize its strangeness. But it would probably still look familiar; is a great example of how even Frost's great poems can induce a kind of ease about their deepest intensities. It is a proud poem, as if his very life depends on his refusal to justify himself with any clear evidence of what he is doing. The apparent "truth" about poetry is that it is actually about the actuality of the announced subject. But is that “truth” even marginally sufficient if, by not thinking so, we run the risk of burdening the poem with “more of the truth”? Brower wrote meticulously about his rhythmic form, but did not allow himself to perceive the deeper pulses in 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 helpful observation that "From the opening lines, the seemingly matter-of-fact speech falls into curious chain sentences, rich in end rhymes and echoes of various kinds" until "the waking memories of facts and their sleepy distortions become impossible to distinguish" (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, and should not be confused with Santayana's rather too meticulous statement that "The artist is a person who consents to dream reality." Consent is not in question, as if reality proposed to us. What is required is toil and toil, the effort of body and mind necessary to bring anything into being. Travail, once again, is both one of the unfortunate consequences of the Fall... middle of the card... at first it is like an unfortunate infusion of the shy Frost - one of those that requires a banal self-derogatory ironies that reveal a sometimes his peculiar embarrassment at the strength of his own sincerity. But the phrase is saved from falsehood, just, by the "fact" that in his tired state the apple picker might actually desire a sleep equivalent to a marmot's hibernation rather than a "human sleep." His sleep will be human precisely because it will be a troubled sleep, full of dreams and myths. Human sleep is more than animal sleep precisely because it is bothered by the memory of what it means to pick apples. Since that famous harvest in the Garden, human life, awake or asleep, has been a dream, and the words are condensed of the myths we have dreamed about the fall and redemption of souls. Works Cited Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing.