After Apple-Picking Dissatisfaction Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (line)

Quote #1

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight (line 9)

You could make a pretty good case that all of the weird and ambivalent imagery in the poem stems from the speaker's vision of the world through a sheet of glass earlier that morning. The morning is the earliest time period that he revisits before falling asleep, and you might say he has been in a funk ever since. "Strangeness" is not necessarily a bad thing, but the vision seems to have disturbed his day in some fashion.

Quote #2

It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell, (lines 13-15)

A large part of the speaker's dissatisfaction stems (pun!) from the fact that he has been anxiously trying to avoid dropping apples all day long. These lines are a mix of fantasy and memory, and his mind cuts away from the moment when the ice falls, as if he were afraid of reliving it. Falling ice is not particularly scary – unless you're under a glacier – but the symbolic act of falling can be very frightening from a psychological point of view.

Quote #3

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. (lines 24-29)

The speaker is also dissatisfied for the simple reason that he has grown bored of the picking process. It sounds nice in theory but, in practice, picking apples is extremely repetitive and monotonous. The endless "rumbling" of the cellar bin highlights the ceaseless activity of the orchard.