After Apple-Picking My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through
A tree toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and another heaped high
With apples that are bruised or rotten.

The pleasure isn’t in doing this;
The pleasure isn’t in the height;
The pleasure is in what we pick and in what’s ripe,
And in what’s done beyond the joy of men
As I’ve sensed it after harvest here.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking; I’m overtired
Of the great harvest I didn’t gather in.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all that struck the earth
No matter if it fell, was gone.

The strawberry is a fruit
That once you get, you don’t have again,
But the apple is always easy to let go.

I wear my harvest at the tip of my tongue
The want, the want is harder to locate
Than the want in the wind —
Pick apple — nascent and ripe.

These apples do not lie at the bottom of
Some drunken farmer’s barrel;
They each have known the night;
They’ve tasted the sun and moon’s blend before
They came here; the future’s ahead of them now.

As for me to whatever degree this is,
It’s a work of complex pleasure
But it’s the waiting that I need
It’s the wish that keeps on coming back —
Tools that a man can hold indefinitely.

But the tree held them up
In all their shapes and colors
As every word begets the further fruit,
So let it go, let it be.

Tomorrow will hold back its
True weight of burdens beyond the farm
Overnight, lost in the rumbling of a night
And still my head will drop, all useless,
Dazed from the pulling and weight of the sky.

• Robert Frost