This paper presents a comparative analysis of two poems — Robert Frost's "After Apple-Picking" and Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" — examining how each poet portrays the theme of life struggle through contrasting lenses. Frost uses symbolism and a dream-like tone to explore disillusionment, regret, and the narrator's contemplation of death as surrender. Bishop, by contrast, employs imagery and simile to depict a fish that embodies perseverance and survival against hardship. Together, the poems reveal that despite opposing emotional registers, both poets ultimately affirm that hope and the will to continue struggling remain central to the human experience.
Literature is considered one of the most effective means through which real life is projected and given various, subjective meanings and interpretations. It serves as a mirror that allows people to look into other people's lives — and even their own — as expressed and interpreted by the artist. Its effectiveness in conveying the dynamics of real life, as it happens to the individual and to society, is evident in both prose and poetry.
This paper presents a comparative analysis of two poems: "After Apple-Picking" by Robert Frost and "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop. These poems share the common theme of life struggle, although each poet explores this theme in distinctly different — even opposing — dimensions. While Frost demonstrates life struggle through disillusionment and hopelessness, Bishop's poem speaks of perseverance in pursuing a meaningful life. Utilizing the poetic techniques of symbolism and imagery, both poets contemplate this theme through their respective works. The analysis that follows highlights the similarities and differences in both poems as they illuminate the struggle of human life.
"After Apple-Picking" is a poem that narrates the sleep and dream the speaker experiences after completing his day's work of picking apples. Beyond the surface narrative, the poem draws an effective distinction between sleep as a literal human activity and sleep as a figurative element of the story. In the poem's own terms, sleep signifies death — a surrender to life after experiencing disappointment, failure, and regret. The poem's theme, primary narrative, and use of tone and symbolism all serve to illustrate how sleep becomes identified with death, and how life grows precious to the narrator as he experiences his dream and feels his impending end — that is, his giving up on the life struggle.
As Robert Frost was known for embedding complex philosophical themes within deceptively simple rural settings, this poem exemplifies that tendency. The apple orchard becomes a landscape of exhaustion and unfinished ambition, and the narrator's drowsiness is weighted with much more than physical fatigue.
The narrator describes the life he has lived through these lines: "And there's a barrel that I didn't fill / Beside it, and there may be two or three / Apples I didn't pick in the bough / But I am done with apple-picking now." These lines illustrate a man who has lived with regret and unaccomplished goals ("there's a barrel I didn't fill"), and who has resolved to end his pursuit of success and accept the death that is fast approaching — made explicit in the final line: "I am done with apple-picking now."
The almost-hallucinated tone of the narrator establishes the reality of his dream, and through that dream, readers are able to discern both his frustrations and his aspirations. The "thousand fruit" and "load and load of apples coming in" emphasize the illusion the narrator holds — a characteristic quality of dreams — and illustrate how he wishes for more opportunities in life, even in the face of past mistakes and failures.
His tone conveys a dream-like quality of hope as he slips into sleep and contemplates whether to begin life anew or let fate take its course by accepting his death — the "sleep" after apple-picking. Towards the end of the poem, however, readers are given a glimpse of hope: the narrator's awakening from that death-sleep is interrupted, and his reflections on disillusionment are once again converted into the possibility of continuing perseverance.
In contrast to Frost's dominant theme of disillusionment, Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" centers on one's perseverance to pursue a meaningful life despite hardship and suffering. Life is depicted broadly, with the symbol of the fish used to provide a powerful and concrete demonstration of life struggle. The fish as a symbol lends force to Bishop's imagery of life as simultaneously dangerous and wonderful — much as the sea is both essential and treacherous for a fish.
The opening lines of the poem are vital to establishing its message, because readers can interpret the narrator's descriptions of the fish as a subjective judgment that also reflects her own personal experience and struggles. The lines "He didn't fight / He hadn't fought at all / He hung a grunting weight…" employ parallelism, emphasizing the fish's apparent lack of struggle — a striking contrast to the natural instinct of most animals when caught.
By describing the fish's failure to struggle after being caught, Bishop invites the interpretation that the fish had resigned itself to its fate — to die at the hands of the narrator. Simile reinforces this reading in the succeeding lines: "his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper / and its pattern of darker brown / was like wallpaper… stained and lost through age." The fish's seemingly ancient appearance foreshadows the narrator's eventual realization that this creature has endured all kinds of hardship and suffering across its lifetime.
"Old hooks reveal fish as survivor and true fighter"
You’re 72% through this paper. Sign up to read the remaining 1 section.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.