Commentary on “After Apple Picking”

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and varied with subtlety. The mystery of the rhymes—when will they come and how abruptly—keeps words and sounds active and hovering over several lines.. Sleep comes seven lines after its partner, heap, and in the interim, sleep has popped up three times in the middle of lines. Sleep is, in fact, all over the poem; the word appears six times. But the way it is delivered here, the last rhyme is masterful. Heap first rhymes internally with sleep, then again internally with sleep, and then again, and only pairs up with the end-word sleep in the poem’s last line. At this point, we’ve nearly forgotten heap. Sleep seems to rhyme with itself, with its repetition, like a sleepy mantra or a sleep-inducing counting of sheep. The poem arrives at final sleep not through a wham-bang rhyming couplet but more “sleepily.”

“Final sleep” is certainly one interpretation of the “long sleep” that the poet contrasts with human sleep. The sleep of the woodchuck is the sleep of winter, and winter, in the ...

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