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 it’s now too late to pull it down. I can tell how the apples are. I have to look for where they fall And tell you underneath cause I will be asleep this time.

The juice in my buckets would turn it all on my face, As my eye is open just long enough to see, But I see it in dreams too, like a kind of light That tells me where even more of them can debark tomorrow’s night.

And what it is about them makes me feel so glad. Whispering through the leaves, the barrel serves them well enough never to fail; it makes me feel a little sad. But the joy does not end when I taste what’s gathered altogether, Because the trees themselves are even more than that through heaven.

• Robert Frost