Unifying metaphor: conceptual approaches and applications

¶ … Metaphor

The two poems "After Apple Picking," and "Birches," are among Frost's best works in terms of poetic imagination and meaning. These works are somewhat discomfiting, for they make use of simple and every-day experiences to address the idea of one's final end, and in so doing not only allow the calm of everyday affairs to infiltrate the reader's thoughts of death, but also allow the gloom of death to pervades their consideration of these mundane events. Both of these poems talk about death using a central metaphor to try to make the unimaginable imaginable; the first speaks of the act of death as descending to sleep after a long day in an orchard, while the second considers the possibility of near-death or reincarnation as comparable to the childhood art of swinging birches.

In "After Apple Picking," Frost's narrator professes to be descending from a hard day picking apples. However, that he speaks more of metaphorical than of literal work is evident in his choice of words, such as referring to his ladder as leading "Toward heaven still..." The mythical impact of his story is heightened by using biblical imagery through-out the poem, both in the reference to the ladder to heaven, and when he speaks of the "the great harvest" (a biblical term for the final judgment). Another such reference is " looking through a pane of glass," which is a direct paraphrase of the Pauline/platonic idea that in life we see through glass dimly, but after death we will see clearly. That he has broken the pane through which he sees the world indicates his death. The Shakespearan reference (from Hamlet) as to what dreams will come to trouble his sleep also indicates that the narrator faces death, which is above all a "long sleep." Yet he does not speak directly of death, but hides its presence within the extended metaphor of retiring from apple-picking. In this metaphor, the apples themselves, which have been carefully collected or which have slipped through his fingers to be lost forever, represent experiences which have been embraced or missed. This is made clear in the way he speaks of cherishing and touching each "in hand." These experiences cannot continue forever, though, as he grows tired. He is descending from the tree and bringing the apples home to the cellar, which represents ending one's life and in the "great harvest" presenting one's final life review to God. At the very end, however, though he was originally certain he did not care about the few missed apples, he begins to be troubled by the thought of having passed over so much and consigning it now to the realm of the impossible. He ends his poem, as he will end his life, with a bittersweet uncertainty.

In "Birches," a similar over-arching metaphor is at work. In this work, the reader does not have to dig so deeply to get at the importance of the central image, for the narrator himself gives it to us: "I'd like to get away from earth awhile and then come back to it and begin again... I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree." How the metaphor actually functions, however, might be served by a bit of explication. In the poem's beginning, the author sees rows of half-dead trees, bowed down under some invisible and explicable weight. He immediately thinks of his own childhood when he would bend down birches and they would spring back. If the birches represent (as the seem to do) the physicality of life experience), then one can see in his childhood games a certain innocence about conscquences and reality. When snow -- true age and time-- come, however, the birches do not spring back but remain bent. So it is that all life prostrates itself to death. Yet the image here of girls drying their hair in the sun, face down, is at once an image of subjugation and also of peace. Traditional death, bowing to the will of God (who is often imagined as being solar), is both peaceful and too final for the author. He prefers to imagine that an innocent child ego-self could somehow subjugate reality to his own will, and bend the birches himself until they obeyed him. This is the beginning of the wish to overcome death. He then continues to describe the way that in walking birches one is at first carried towards the sky (as in death) and then bends towards the world again: "Up to the brim, and even above the brim. Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish, Kicking his way down through the air to the ground..." Though he himself is not so innocent anymore, and comprehends that the woods of reality are far darker than he had imagined them as a child, being "too much like a pathless wood Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs Broken across it, and one eye is weeping," yet he would nonetheless like to go back to that innocence and "escape." He quickly swears off any wish to die -- in case it should be taken too far and he should end up truly dead and unable to return to earth-- but he longs to be able to embrace death if he could be sure that he would return immediately to earth as a child so that he could "begin over." In short, this is a metaphorical longing for childhood which recognizes that such a childhood is only approachable now if one were to die and be reborn. The symbols of the birches at once represent the futility of such a hope (after all, they are bent down now and have no more spring in them to lift one up and down) and the possibility that such a thing might be.