Robert Frost once said "There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is a metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority" (The Atlantic Monthly, 1946). In "After Apple Picking", Robert Frost does as he said, he uses a simple story about a man, who, after a hard day of picking apples, is tired …showed first 75 words of 1286 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1286 total…of the hard work. All these years with apples showed him that however his values of nature may be noble, it can't help him return to the perfect world of Garden of Eden where he can be one with nature. Robert Frost uses common objects from our everyday life to help us read the poem, like apples, but we must read it closer and more carefully, in order to understand the double meaning as well.