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 there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well upon my way to sleep Before it fell, and I had to call it after me For I am done with apple-picking now.

Apple-picking’s never done.

I am done with the things I see now, And the wants that haunt me. I am done with the world of night. Let the apples be where they may. For I am not the man I was last fall, And I do not want to pick anymore.

• Robert Frost