has anyone read the poem "After Apple Picking" by Robert Frost?
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The point of the poem is not really what it means... because what it means is basically what you read. There is no underlying deep, philosophical meaning to it. It is a simply, living poem. When you read it, its supposed to "conjure" up the images, the sounds, the tastes, etc. It's the imagery thats strong and important. The meaning of the poem is really basic, so I won't tell you specifically tell you what it is. But my answer is a hint.
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I dont know the poem.  But I think its beautiful.  Seems like an interesting topic, poem.
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Poe wrote this poem in the autograph album of Lucy Holmes, later Lucy Holmes Balderston. Initially, Ingram rejected the poem, but later admitted it to his edition of Poe's Works. In interpreting the manuscript, Ingram made a number of changes in punctuation, mostly replacing dashes with commas, semicolons or periods.] \n\nI find lines 1-8 to be a statement of remorseful acceptance in his adult life of his inability to appreciate "the sunny side of life" as most others claim to do. \nThe words "I could not awaken" would indicate his failed attempts to do so.\nIn his adult life, he accepts his perceived great "difference" from others; he is not referring to the everyday differences which make us all unique but rather, a chasm which separates him. \nThe remaining lines are a retrospective view of his early life, beginning when he first realized that he had a fascination with the morose and morbid.\n\nThen- in my childhood, in the dawn\nOf a most stormy life- was drawn\nFrom every depth of good and ill\nThe mystery which binds me still\n\nThe "mystery" is simply put, his "darkness".\n\nThe remaining lines build to the climax of the poem, which I feel is the last line.\n\n"From the torrent, or the fountain" tells us he sees darkness in both good and "bad" things equally. "From the red cliff of the mountain" paints a sanguine picture of foreboding power, "From the sun that round me rolled, In its autumn tint of gold" paints a picture of the fall, a time of impending death before the cold of winter - it's no coincidence that Halloween is celebrated then. "From the lightning in the sky" introduces the climax, \n\n"From the thunder and the storm,\nAnd the cloud that took the form\n(When the rest of Heaven was blue)\nOf a demon in my view."\n\nIn the final two line, he illustrates fully his propensity to find the morbid in even the most beautiful of things where others do not, and brings us full circle to the beginning of the poem.\n\nI feel the word demon is perhaps the most important in the entire poem. It indicates the level of his darkness of vision, and gives scale to the chasm that he feels separates him from others.
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ive read it i think its a pretty good book .\ni recom. lovely bones  -or- the five people you meet in heaven
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This was a very enjoyable book, I first read it about 15 years ago.  It is semi-autobiographical in that the author is a pilot and the narrator of the book is a pilot who meets a man with an interesting insight into the human condition and who appears to be a messiah.\n\nThe book is full of memorable lines and makes the reader contemplate life and why we are here.  I definitely recommend it. \n\nThe following link has a number of quotes from the book.
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The general theme is the passage of time, and the need or desire to live as much as we can, as deeply as we can before our time here is gone.  "Time will not be ours forever/... Suns that set may rise again;/But if once we lose this light,/'Tis with us perpetual night"\n\nIn the moment of the poem, there is the classic situation of the boy (presumably) trying to convince his love-interest, Celia, to give in to passion and enjoy the "sports of love" with him, to use the poem's language.  \n\nThe lover uses a two prong argument.\n\nFirst, he argues that time is short and they, her especially, really shouldn't waste it, "Spend not then his gifts in vain."  He invokes a responsibility not to take the gift of time and life given them for granted.  A slightly more dignified argument, yet a sense of playfullness remains: "Cannot we delude the eyes/of a few poor household spies,/Or his easier ears beguile,/So removed by our wile?"  So at the same time he rebukes her rejection (one presumes she said no, at least initially, why then the poem?) for wasting precious time, he tempts her with a conspiracy--arm's length v. intimacy.\n\nSecond, he argues that it's not the act of lovemaking that is the crime, but the tattling or telling of it:  "'Tis no sin love's fruit to steal/But the sweet theft to reveal."  Fame and rumor are equally derided in favor of the moment, of the real, which here is the joy of love.\n\nThe speaker never really loses sight of his objective, even tho he dresses it up philosophically.  Playfully, he casts these arguments about, both putting her on the defensive and drawing her into a conspiracy of "us against the world".  Ingenious, really.  And fun.  Jonson was classical poet, brilliant, witty and very clever.  If you like this poem, you might try John Donne and Robert Herrick.
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The Flower That Lives Above The Clouds\nLONG ago, long ago when the flowers first woke to life on this dear earth, each chose where it would live as it chose, too, the color of its petals.\n"I will cover the ground and make the bare soil gay with green blades," cried the grass.\n"I will live in the fields and by roadsides," laughed the daisy.\n"I, too," echoed the buttercup, the cornflower, the poppy, and the clover.\n"Give me the ponds and the lakes," the water lily called.\n"And let us have the streams and the marshes," begged the irises, cowslips, and Jacks-in-the-pulpit.\n"We love the shaded, ferny woodland spots," lisped the shy forget-me-nots and wood-violets.\n"And we wish to be petted in gardens," declared the rose, the pansies, the sweet williams, the hollyhocks.\n"I love the warm dry sun — I will go to the sandy desert," said the cactus. So all places except the bare ridges of high mountains were chosen. To these, no flower wished to go.\n"There is not enough food there!" the daisy explained.\n"There is not enough warmth! There is not enough food!" all decided. " It is so bare and chilly! Let the gray moss go and cover the rocks," they said.\nBut the moss was loath to go.\n"When one cannot live without moisture, warmth, nourishment — when one must have petting or live in a garden, surely the bleak places of the mountains must do without flowers! How foolish it would be to try to make the ragged, bare mountain-tops lovely! Let the gray moss go — he has not yet chosen!"\nSo the gray moss went up the high mountains because he was told to go. He climbed over the bare rocks beyond the places where forests ceased to grow. All was desolate and silent up there.\nUp higher and higher crept the gray moss. It went even above the clouds where the ragged rocks were covered with ice and snow.\nThere it stopped short in amazement, for it found a quiet star-shaped flower clinging to the crags and blossoming! It was white like the snow around it, and its heart was of soft yellow. So cold was it up there that the little flower had cased its leaves in soft wool to keep warm and living in the bleakness.\n"Oh!" cried the gray moss, stopping short. "How came you here where there was no warmth, no moisture, no nourishment? It is high above the forests, high above the clouds! I came because I was sent. Who are you?"\nThen the little starry flower nodded in the chill wind. "I am the edelweiss," it said. "I came here quietly because there was need of me, that some blossom might brighten these solitudes."\n"And didn't they tell you to come?"\n"No," said the little flower. "It was because the mountains needed me. There are no flowers up here but me."\nThe edelweiss is closer to the stars than the daisy, the buttercup, the iris, or the rose. Those who have courage, like it, have found it high above the clouds, where it grows ever gladly. They call it Noble White — that is its name, edelweiss! Love, like the edelweiss, knows not self-sacrifice.\n\n\nAnd\nOn a crisp spring morning a young Bavarian couple set out on a hike through the mountains with grand alpine peaks piercing the blue skies of southern Germany. A few hours into their hike, they have walked through meadows full of blooming yellow, blue and purple wildflowers. However, they have not come across the one flower they want to find- the Edelweiss. Just beyond, the young man spots the white flower with felt like petals on an exposed cliff. In order to pick the Edelweiss, he ignores his own safety to prove his bravery. Reaching out on loose rock, he finally has the flower, the “ultimate love charm” of the Alps. With the simple gesture of giving the young woman the Edelwiess, the young man is once and for all able to express his lasting love.\nFor generations this flower has been the insp
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First,\nIs this the one you mean?\n"It takes all sorts of in- and outdoor schooling \nTo get accustomed to my kind of fooling."\nIt is from his poem called "Something for Hope".\n\n"Something For Hope"\n\nAt the present rate it must come to pass\nAnd that right soon that the meadow sweet\nAnd steeple bush not good to eat\nWill have crowded out the edible grass.\n\nThen all there is to do is wait\nFor maple birch and spruce to push\nThrough meadow sweet and steeple bush\nAnd crowd them out at a similar rate.\n\nNo plow among these rocks would pay.\nSo busy yourself with other things\nWhile the trees put on their wooden rings\nAnd with long-sleeved branches hold their sway.\n\nThen cut down the trees when lumber grown,\nAnd there's your pristine earth all freed\nFrom lovely blooming but wasteful weed\nAnd ready again for the gr to own.\n\nA cycle we'll say of a hundred years.\nThus foresight does it and laissez faire,\nA virtue in which we all may share\nUnless a government interferes.\n\nPatience and looking away ahead,\nAnd leaving some things to take their course.\nHope may not nourish a cow or horse,\nBut spes alit agricolam 'tis said.\n\nSecond of all,\n"The Gift Outright" was a poem written by Frost and later recited by Frost at JFK's Inauguration.\n\n"The Gift Outright"\n~ The Gift Outright ~\n\nThe land was ours before we were the land's.\nShe was our land more than a hundred years\nBefore we were her people. She was ours\nIn Massachusetts, in Virginia.\nBut we were England's, still colonials,\nPossessing what we still were unpossessed by,\nPossessed by what we now no more possessed.\nSomething we were withholding made us weak.\nUntil we found out that it was ourselves\nWe were withholding from our land of living,\nAnd forthwith found salvation in surrender.\nSuch as we were we gave ourselves outright\n(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)\nTo the land vaguely realizing westward,\nBut still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,\nSuch as she was, such as she would become.\n\n\nHope that is help for you!
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This is a beautiful poem about losing a loved one..\n\nWhen I'm gone from your side, \nAnd all your tears have been dried ...\n\nDo not stand at my grave and weep, \n\nI am not there, I do not sleep.\n\n\n\n\nI am a thousand winds that blow;\n\nI am the diamond glints on snow;\n\nI am the sunlight on ripened grain; \n\nI am the gentle autumn's rain.\n\n\n\n\nWhen you awaken in the morning hush, \n\nI am the swift uplifting rush \n\nOf quiet birds in circled flight.\n\nI am the soft star that shines at night.\n\n\n\n\nAnd when you stroll in the evening hours, \n\nAnd smell the aroma of beautiful flowers;\n\nThere'll be no need to sob and cry ...\n\nI am not there, I did not die!\n\n\n~ Author Unknown ~
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I've always liked this poem...\n\nOne night I had a dream--\nI dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord \nand across the sky flashed scenes from my life. \nFor each scene I noticed two sets of footprints, \none belonged to me and the other to the Lord. \nWhen the last scene of my life flashed before me,\nI looked back at the footprints in the sand.\nI noticed that many times along the path of my life,\nthere was only one set of footprints.\nI also noticed that it happened at the very lowest\nand saddest times in my life. \nThis really bothered me and I questioned the Lord about it. \n"Lord, you said that once I decided to follow you,\nyou would walk with me all the way,\nbut I have noticed that during the most troublesome times in my life\nthere is only one set of footprints. \n"I don't understand why in times when I needed you most,\nyou should leave me." \nThe Lord replied, "My precious, precious child,\nI love you and I would never, never leave you\nduring your times of trial and suffering. \n"When you saw only one set of footprints,\nit was then that I carried you."\n\nMary Stevens
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The poem describes the encounter between an unnamed knight and a mysterious fairy. It opens with a description of the knight in a barren landscape, "haggard" and "woe-begone". He tells the reader how he met a beautiful lady whose "eyes were wild"; he set her on his horse and they went together to her "elfin grot", where they began to make love. Falling asleep, the knight had a vision of "pale kings and princes", who warn him that "La Belle Dame sans Merci hath thee in thrall!". He awoke to find himself on the same "cold hill's side" where he is now "palely loitering".\n\nAlthough La Belle Dame Sans Merci is short (only twelve stanzas of four lines each, with an ABCB rhyme scheme), it is full of enigmas. Because the knight is associated with images of death - a lily, paleness, "fading", "wither[ing]" - he may well be dead himself at the time of the story. He is clearly doomed to remain on the hillside, but the cause of this fate is unknown. A straightforward reading suggests that the Belle Dame entraps him, along the lines of tales like Thomas the Rhymer or Tam Lin. More recent feminist commentators have suggested that the knight in fact raped the Belle Dame, and is being justly punished - this is based on textual hints like "she wept, and sigh'd full sore". Ultimately, the decision comes down to whether Keats wrote the poem as a simple story, or as a story with a moral: given his other work, this may be more an evocation of feeling than an intellectual attempt at moralising.
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**********************************************************************\n\nDon't feel bad. Nobody explained it to me, either, and I must say I made quite an impression that first night with the honey and feathers. But now I'm hip. The significance of the birds and bees isn't what they do, it's simply that they do it, "it," naturally, being a tussle in the tumbleweeds, or wherever it is that the lower orders engage in sex. As such it's the perfect euphemism for a culture so prudish that even publishers of girlie magazines used to airbrush out the pubic hair.\n\nWhere exactly "the birds and the bees" originated nobody knows, but word sleuths William and Mary Morris hint that it may have been inspired by words like these from the poet Samuel Coleridge: "All nature seems at work ... The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing ... and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing." Making honey, pairing ... yes, we can definitely tell what Sam had on his mind.\n\nThe Morrises offer the theory that schools in years past taught about sex by "telling how birds do it and how bees do it and trusting that the youngsters would get the message by indirection." Right. Luckily for the perpetuation of the species, there's always been Louie in the schoolyard to explain how things really worked.\n\n*********************************************************************
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Well... this is more of a lust poem, but he may like it. A woman once gave it to me, and I was flying for days!\n\nO Blush Not So! \nby John Keats \n\nO blush not so! O blush not so! \nOr I shall think you knowing; \nAnd if you smile the blushing while, \nThen maidenheads are going. \n\nThere's a blush for want, and a blush for shan't, \nAnd a blush for having done it; \nThere's a blush for thought, and a blush for nought, \nAnd a blush for just begun it. \n\nO sigh not so! O sigh not so! \nFor it sounds of Eve's sweet pippin; \nBy these loosen'd lips you have tasted the pips \nAnd fought in an amorous nipping. \n\nWill you play once more at nice-cut-core, \nFor it only will last our youth out, \nAnd we have the prime of the kissing time, \nWe have not one sweet tooth out. \n\nThere's a sigh for aye, and a sigh for nay, \nAnd a sigh for "I can't bear it!" \nO what can be done, shall we stay or run? \nO cut the sweet apple and share it!
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Awesome poem!\nAmazing!! lol...\nu were 10 or 11? that's so amazing!
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The name of the poem is (My Garden—"His Garden") by Charles Haddon Spurgeon\n\nhttp://www.ccel.org/ccel/spurgeon/sermons42.txt
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I am familiar with him, and I studied his plays.  \n\nThe poem was new to me, but it is short so I have an inkling what Mr. Williams may have been thinking.\n\nSome people believe that a soul that has never been born resides is a perfect place, perhaps even Heaven.  The Heavenly Grass is TWs metaphor for that place.  I think he mentions both day and night in the first half to show that he had completed a "cycle."  That he was ready to be born.  \n\nAnother possibility is the Heavenly Grass is his mother's womb.  He completed the cycle of growing, and then he was ready to be born.\n\nSo in the next part is his birth, and then he travels the earth.\n\nAt the end he admits that he misses what was before.  Whether it is Heaven or his mother's womb, it was a simpler and safer time for him.  He repeats himself for emphasis.
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Not Quite Social\nBy:Robert Frost\n\nSome of you will be glad I did what I did,\nAnd the rest won't want to punish me too sverely\nFor finding a thing to do that though not forbid\nYet wasn't enjoined and wasn't expected,clearly.\n\nTo punish me overcruelly wouldn't be right\nFor merely giving you once more gentle proof\nThat the city's hold on a man is no more tight\nThan when its walls rose high than any roof.\n\nYou may taunt me with not being able to flee the earth.\nYou have me there, but loosely,as I would be held.\nThe way of understanding is partly mirth.\nI would not be taken as ever having rebelled.\n\nAnd anyone is free to condemn me to death-\nIf he leaves it to nature to carry out the sentence.\nI shall will to the common stock of air my breath\nAnd pay a death tax of fairly polite repentance.