Temporal Suspension in “After Apple Picking”
By Gabriel Hartley — 6-14 August 2020
[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]
Related Posts—Draft Chapters
- Back Out of All This
- The Mountain Held the Town as in a Shadow
- Of Stars and Stones
- The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep
- A Journey of Objective Chance in “The Wood-Pile”
- Or Just Some Human Sleep
- Birches: Going and Coming Back
- The Poet Afield: Robert Frost’s “Waiting—Afield at Dusk” and “Mowing”
I am engaging here in a recursive mode of reading Robert Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking” that, I believe, does justice to the recursivity at the heart of the poem itself. For I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight of the revelations that continue to dawn on me as I sink, surprised, into the poem’s textured layers. What for years, decades even, appeared to me as a relatively simple nostalgic dip into seasonal recursivity—“It’s fall, so let’s go apple picking”; “It’s fall, so let’s read this poem once more”—now proves to keep me in suspense, dangling as if suspended above the heart of the scene as it unfolds and infolds simultaneously in the reading. I would say “in the reading stream,” but the sequential aspect of that trope has to give way to the sense of churning in the tidal reflux that the poem sets in motion. Days come and go, seasons come and go, waking up and falling asleep seem to follow some order of regularity and punctuality, and yet as the rounds of days and seasons return in what we call the passage of time, all of those moments past, present, and future come to live inside of and resonate within one another all at once. Right here, right now, I can hear the voices and smell the aromas and see the angling drop of sun into the azimuth pointing towards winter of all those past experiences of picking apples in fall. And I can feel the future reiterations of this activity (and all that it encompasses) birth themselves from this very scene in this very moment which is all moments at once.
At once. The phrase “at once” means both “right now” (“Do this at once!”) and “simultaneously” (“Both of these meanings inhere in the phrase at once”). Simultaneity, a key motif in the poem, presents us with a mode of unending presentness of the past and a drawing inward of the future so that all relative time hangs suspended over the present expression of presencing. My sense of reading, then, is a suspending reading, just as the poem is a suspending poem in which the speaker/poet keeps all of us suspended above the moment-by-moment timeline we imagine to be operative in the “real world”—just as the speaker has been (and remains) suspended on his ladder in the apple tree between heaven and earth in the first lines:
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still (1-2)
As we will see, this “stillness,” so to speak, of the ladder does not just refer to the present location of the ladder in terms of space (“The ladder is still sticking through a tree out there while I am drifting off to sleep right here”) but also in terms of the speaker’s present consciousness, as if to say, “Even here some time later while lying in this bed, I am still suspended on that ladder out there in such a way that the ladder is in here, with me still, as though time stands still.” But this standing still is itself infinitely complicated here. For while “standing still” normally implies a state of frozen motion, the temporal motion within the poem never stops. The past won’t stay still—it is still here. All moments—again past, present, and future—are still in motion in this moment. (We will see exactly how the future moment is implicated in the poem’s present in a future moment of this essay.)
So one of the most haunting elements of “After Apple-Picking” for me is its complication of all sense of time. While the poem appears to provide an account of the temporal sequence of a workday within the seasonal sequence of our relationship with the land, these temporal circuits are short-circuited. I am not suggesting that the linear run of time disappears in the absorptive expansiveness of the present moment but rather that past and future remain fully available and operative in the here and now of the time of the poem. Past and future are always fully present—presently presencing—in the experience we call the present.
A First Round
But first, let’s return to the beginning, for recursivity depends on the first iteration of cursiveness, of the first course of reading, of engaging the linearity of the poem line by line, step by step, moment by moment. In other words, let’s return to those words that open the poem (that open us up for the poem):
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still (1-2) . . .
The poem opens in a characteristically Frostian set of circumstances. The possessive pronoun “my” stakes out a field of relationality that involves the consciousness of the poet right off the bat: whose ladder this is I think I know. It’s my ladder, and so this poem opens with my relationship to the spanning function of ladders and trees and the space between heaven and earth. This is not a relation of ownership (“whose woods”) but of use: this is the ladder I have used all day long while I was (and remain) suspended between worlds.
But why point out that the ladder is two-pointed? Yes, ladders are typically two-pointed, and Frost is not typically a poet who chooses words just to fill out the metrics of a poem (more on metrics soon). One possibility is that the ladder’s two-pointedness amplifies the dualistic problem that animates the poem as a whole. We are between this world and that world, between sleep and waking, between everyday consciousness and the dream state, between human and animal, and so on. The one-pointedness of a birch tree will serve for a moment of swinging, but it takes at least two poles to remain suspended between heaven and earth for any length of time. And the ladder is not simply leaning against a tree but sticking through it toward heaven—a spatial span paired with the temporal span “still.”
In what sense is the ladder sticking through the tree still? On one level, as we will see as we work our way through the poem, we might suppose that the ladder is not actually still in the tree but put away at the end of the day’s work. It would still be in the tree only in the dream-state reanimation of the day’s activities, just as the speaker still feels “the pressure of a ladder-round” (21) as he dozes off to sleep. But more likely, given that “there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill / Beside it” (3-4), the ladder and the barrel are still in place waiting for the work to resume in the morning. For even though the boy has worked all day long, “there may be two or three / Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough” (4-5).
“But I am done with apple-picking now” (6). Upon first coming to this line, the reader is likely to take it as a simple matter-of-fact statement about the end of the day’s work. But once we have gone through the poem completely and have then returned to this line, we will then have seen that this is the first sign of the poet’s exhaustion. Whatever autumn celebratory nostalgia the poem might have evoked so far in a reader (such as myself) now seems to be tempered by the recognition that the hard work of the harvest might not leave a lot of room for appreciating the beauty of the seasonal round of things.
Interestingly, another key Frostian gesture expresses itself here in the word “but” that opens the statement “But I am done with apple-picking now.” As in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” what we have here is a mode of logical suspension through temporal condensation: “But” indicates the beginning of a statement of difference, of disagreement or complication. But the “statement” which it is clarifying is never stated. It is a statement in suspension. Readers automatically fill in the gap of implication by silently sounding the missing statement in their heads so that the full logical sequence would look something like this:
[T]here may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough [That I should have picked]. But I am done with apple-picking now [despite not having completed my wished-for goal.]
These remaining apples, suspended on some bough, keep me suspended in the task that I could not finish in a full day as I now doze off into some troubled state of sleep. And this incompletion makes itself felt in the logical suspension of stated desire, a suspension or declarative gap that gives body to all of the incomplete tasks of the season as we draw the future ever inward, foreclosing the desired conclusion of the forward motion of our onward presencing. The transit from late fall to early winter carries with it the longing for a long night’s sleep, matching the transit from waking to sleeping consciousness in which the “scent of apples” hangs in the drowsy dreamscape field of perception, a field separate syntactically as well as sensorially in the spacing of the poem:
Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. (7-8; italics mine)
This perceptual-temporal shift has hung about the picker ever since frosty morning when he first gazed at the world of hoary grass through the translucent sheet of ice (consolidated here in the regulating rhythm of four iambic pentameter lines):
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. (9-12)
The morning began, then, with the picker’s awe at the transformative power that the shifts in the natural round of things can lend to our human perception. Ice provides us here with an alternative lens for taking in the world around us. And while the movement of the poem complicates our ability to maintain this awe, we should not (assuming we could) simply leave this awakening behind as we engage with the poet’s later shifts in consciousness and attitude as the day and the poem progress. This gift of visionary awe is not so easily shattered when he lets go of the ice pane:
It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. (13-17)
Notice how the time span of the ice’s fall stretches from morning to night, from the perspectival glimpse of a world through ice to one seen through the lens of dream consciousness. And in collaboration with the shift in the poem’s content is the interruption of the rhythm of the lines (13-17) as we experience the staggered shift from five iambs to two to five to two and then back to five, strung together with the suspending rhyming linkage of break-well-fell-tell-take. In this multi-layered dream-space between waking and sleeping—what I will call the Ice-Pane Moment—the repetitive activities of the long workday have so impressed themselves upon the poet’s sensorium that everything remains suspended in place and yet remains in motion just as it had been throughout the day. He is truly not done with apple picking now.
We are presented with this heightened memory loop on the visual plane:
Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. (18-20)
On the tensorial muscular plane:
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. (21-23)
On the aural plane:
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. (24-26)
Each sensory register of these past events remains suspended in the present tense. And so, ultimately, the ebbs and flows of the workday become too much, completely overwhelming the poet’s sensorial matrix:
For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. (27-29)
The rhyme of “tired” and “desired” brings the tensions and flows of the day—and the poem—into focus: Are we capable of handling the range of our desire? How do we approach the bounties of this world up to but not beyond the point of too much (like the pouring of the water into vibrant tension just above the cup’s brim in “Birches”)? How do we caress the gifts of the world at hand without degrading or spoiling them? How do we return this surplus of desire to a proper past tense? “There were . . .”
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 not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth. (30-36)
Perhaps the most tender and telling moment in the poem so far is the move from “not let fall” to “For all.” The rhyme yokes together the moment of care and caress with the slip and loss of control when, suspended between heaven and earth, you drop the apple you had so desired and bring about its mundane transubstantiation at the foot of your ladder. Or so they say. The yoking function of the rhyme overrides the rhythmic interruption as the line drops from ten syllables to two (five iambs to a single one), yet the interruption leaves us suspended and stunned before the moment of striking the earth, ultimately and apparently as of no worth. The suspension of temporality is here figured in the lineation of the poem’s design itself, in the suspension of the movement of linear rhythm and disruption. The collapse of the syllabic metrics from ten to two gives body to the collapse (or conflation or condensation) of our conventional time scheme into the simultaneous multidimensionality that the poem enacts.
At this point the reader is drawn into a futural present moment of visionary communion in the “one can see” as we are drawn as one into this impersonal one:
One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. (37-38)
The future moment has been drawn into the present of anticipation: our temporal vision (“one can see”) doesn’t project us into the future (“what will trouble”) but draws that future experience to us here and now as the metrical units briefly shift from iambs to a trochee-dactyl-trochee string (stressed-unstressed / stressed-unstressed-unstressed / stressed-unstressed): ONE-can / SEE-what-will / TROU-ble) then back to iambic (“this SLEEP”). That future presences itself now as an impression (as an inflection) of this pulsating now.
In the process of the poem “my ladder” becomes “my sleep.” And yet the universalizing nature of human sleep retroactively lets us know that my ladder is and always was, in fact, our ladder, that my desire is our desire, and that, whatever sleep it is, this sleep is our collective human sleep. Like the dropped apple, the speaker’s consciousness—and perhaps our own—has fallen from the transformative ice-pane awe of morning to the suspended reach toward heaven to the dropping back to troubling earth in dream-troubled sleep. We are invited into this meditation on the troubled nature of sleep that lies on the other (future) side of this dozing transition: Is this the restorative pause in the animal cycle provided by winter hibernation or just an all-too-human momentary stay against confusion? Will the future be futural enough?
Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. (39-42)
And yet, despite the seeping resignation of this exhausted state, the poet, unaware, is able to maintain a perceptual awareness that allows him a communicative communion with the sleeping things of nature: the woodchuck cannot say what kind of sleep this is, not because woodchucks and humans cannot communicate (the conventional understanding that sees fallen apples as degraded) but because the woodchuck has already dropped into his own animal version of dream consciousness in his earthen burrow and his earthen consciousness. The earth that is seen to pollute the fallen apple is now the natural home of more-than-human sleep.
Were they both awake, we could join the poet in a communal mode of human-and-animal earthen consciousness that the draining nature of the world of desire-turned-work eclipses. And this remains the promise, ultimately, of the poem itself: despite the dropping-down-to-earth experiences that might from time to time trouble our sleep, in the end this superconscious mode of natural communication remains at our disposal. In the end, this consciousness provides its own gifts, a mode of cohabitation that suspends the categorical distinctions that normally frame our interactions with the world, despite the common remonstrations that such a mode of engagement is to be seen “as of no worth.” And in this sense, we become the ladder itself suspended still between heaven and earth, past and future, human and animal, as we drift dreaming into our human-woodchuck sleep with its hopeful lure of future rest.
Recourse — Suspension
Having gone through a first round of reading through the poem, line by line—a round that depends, of course, on my having gone through a hundred earlier rounds on my own—I now want to go back through in order to underscore other implications that can only be fully appreciated through such a recourse. This recursivity of reading helps us to experience the nesting effect of the temporal schemes of the poem itself. And given the experience of poetic time that I have suggested above, I will step out of the sequential order of the lines of the poem and reanimate it from its temporal-figural center. We can then return to the opening lines of the poem with a greater attunement to the ways in which they anticipate this central time structure and, afterwards, to the third time structure—the futural.
What I will suggest up front at this stage is that the poem presents us with an experiential comprehension of temporality as a nested superimposition of disparate animated time loops. I say “animated” in order to underscore the distinction, crucial for my reading, between, first, time as a sequential flow of now moments which in visual terms would be figured by the still image (as in stills in a movie sequence) and second, time as a nested configuration of animated loops (as in video segments). For anyone who has worked with animation software, in which the visual moving flow is broken down into image stills that can be grouped together as collective units along a timeline, this distinction should be clear. And if you then imagine superimposing these loops or clips on top of one another so that they can be seen as a single complex temporal depth of field—in which the audience would see three different scenes simultaneously playing on top of or through one another at once—then the notion of still time-in-motion as presented in Frost’s poem should be clear as well. If something is “still standing still,” then the temporal complex that stages this continuing stillness reveals that stillness is never really still but always already flowing, suspended across the flow of things as the resolution of duality that the space of the between initially suggests.
The key moment in the poem in which this temporal condensation or superimposition occurs is, again, in the following lines as the speaker is dozing off to sleep in complete physical and mental exhaustion:
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 could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. (9-17)
The morning began, then, with the speaker’s awe at the transformative perceptual shift that the sheet of ice provides, an alternative lens for taking in the world around us. Notice once more how the time span of the ice’s fall stretches from morning to night, from the perspectival glimpse of a world through ice to one seen through the lens of dream consciousness. In this dream-space between waking and sleeping, the repetitive activities of the long workday have so impressed themselves upon the poet’s sensorium that everything remains in place and yet remains in motion just as it had been throughout the day. As I have mentioned earlier, I refer to the realization that these lines provide as the Ice-Pane Moment.
Were we to provide a graphic notation for the time scheme of the Ice-Pane Moment, we would not have a centrifugal sequence focusing on the present and moving backwards into the past and forwards into the future, a bi-directional swallowing up of all dimensions of time by the present as it expands outwards, consuming all:
We would have instead a centripetal draw of past and future into the present moment:
In other words, it is not that the present focus erases its relationship to past and future but rather that past and future implode inward upon the present train of consciousness.
Our consciousness of this centripetal implosion belies the apparent sequentiality of the linear arrangement of the poem (and, for that matter, of any poem). For once we return to the start in order to read the lines again after the Ice-Pane Moment, the first lines are no longer first. They are now saturated with the temporal-cognitive-rhythmic suspension that each subsequent line has presented to us in the first and subsequent readings. Just as the same portal often serves as both the entrance and the exit of a building, so the first lines come after the final lines when we return for another reading.
In terms of the Ice-Pane Moment, the opening lines of the poem now place themselves within this centripetal presencing that stirs up the conventional expectations for verb tense we have been taught in terms of the relationships between past, present, and future. When we first read that the “long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still,” we do not yet understand that this still moment suspends us over the inward temporal fusion of the poem. This past moment is still in the present tense, which normally would be nothing startling until we discover that the speaker is still standing on this ladder that is still sticking through the tree even as he is drifting off to sleep. The past is spoken in the present tense.
And yet the present moment is then spoken in the past tense: “But I was well / Upon my way before it fell.” At this point, the work of the Ice-Pane Moment now draws the future into the past tense: “And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take.” But we never in fact arrive at this future dream moment, spoken of here in the past tense, by the end of the poem. It is still about to happen in the suspended future of the poem that is drawn into the vortex of the poem’s present moment. We might assume that the lines that follow in their sheer present-tense detail are a moment in that dream— “Magnified apples appear and disappear, / Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear” (18-20)—and yet towards the concluding lines of the poem we see (again in the present tense) that the speaker has in fact not yet fallen asleep: “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is” (37-38). We can see into the future (“what will trouble”) of the sleep that is spoken of in the present tense (“whatever sleep it is”) in a moment of conscious awareness that could never really be described as sleep. And yet . . .
The Dreamscape Metrics of Desire
The temporal inversions brought about by the Ice-Pane Moment provide us with an unexpected complication of the temporality of desire. Desire is always anticipatory—or so it appears. The lack of fulfilment always points towards a future moment of satiation, the moment of fulfilment that is the point when we have had enough. And yet in the poem this hoped-for moment of fulfilment in the present, in the present tense, never arrives to consciousness: we have too little and then we have too much. We never just have enough: “For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired” (27-29). Our “long two-pointed ladder is sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still” (1-2), but we are done with apple picking now.
After all, the title of the poem is not “Apple-Picking” but “After Apple-Picking.” In a poem whose metrics is dominated by iambic pentameter, our ladder stands out in an opening line bound by iambic hexameter. There is one metric foot too many right off the bat. And even then the statement runs over into the second line into the still space-time of heaven marked by a truncated trochaic trimeter. In a world that will be measured in iambic pentameter, we already have too much and too little on the level of linear temporality. And yet the additional “too little” of the three-footed line illustrates the excessive unruliness of a rhythm out of bounds. Not only do I need to stretch my desire into six feet; I have to add three more inverted feet before I’m done. But by then I’m overdone, and the word “still” interrupts and suspends the trochaic flow, becoming a whole note in two-quarter time that haunts the entire poem.
The iambic pentameter rhythm restores a sense of regularity for eleven more lines, but this rhythm is broken by the two two-foot lines that break up the metrics of the Ice-Pane Moment:
It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. (13-17)
At the heart of this visionary shift in perspective is a break in the metrics of sustained desire that regulates the apparent structure of the poem. Yet it is really this punctuation, this metric interruption, that gives us the key to the poem. For at the moment of fulfillment we fall out of regular time again and again:
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. (24-29)
The rumbling sound of the load of apples snaps us out of our pentametric stupor by expressing itself in the two-footed break of line 25. The pentametric expression of the load on load in line 26 attempts to return us to normality, only to be undone yet again by the three-footed break of line 27, notably speaking the words “For I have had too much.” Yet the expression of this exhaustion (“overtired”-“desired”) draws us sleepily back into the rule of iambic pentameter. Even so, once the speaker focuses on the luscious touch of the ten thousand thousand fruit, trying to “not let fall,” the rhythm breaks down completely—and beautifully—into the single-footed line “For all” (32). The poem never regains the dominating rhythm of the iambic pentameter and concludes with the truncated three feet of the final line, “Or just some human sleep” (42). The whole-note character of “sleep” draws us back to the whole-note extension of “still,” framing the entire iambic rush by these extended syllabic points that embody the centripetal implosion we experienced via the timeframe of the narrative field of the poem. All motion animating the poem is now drawn into the churning suspension of the word “sleep.”
Or Just Some Human Sleep
If we grant pride of place to the poem’s concluding lines as the concluding lines—that is, as an opportunity to draw these recursive reflections together as a conclusion to an argument, an engagement, a journey—then we arrive at the question of how the distinction between woodchuck and human sleep fits into the complex temporal suspension of the time of the poem in terms of the dynamics of the Ice-Pane Moment. Because, again, the speaker never actually reaches that sleep state, whether human or woodchuck, within the bounds of the poem itself. As a conclusion of a meditation on the dynamics of desire after apple-picking, the speaker now desires something like a woodchuck state of sleep, hibernation as a mode of temporality that provides us with a way to step out of the regimentation of the standard notion of moment-by-moment temporality and utilitarian labor. For in such a typical time scheme, human sleep can never give us the rest we actually need. Here, it seems, human sleep itself always remains subject to the onward rush of sequentiality and productivity. “I desired this intimate embrace of apples,” we might say, “to touch each one, hold it in hand and not let fall, but instead I was caught up in the rush of the seasonal impulse to gather and to store the apples for future sustenance—not for present enjoyment.” The nostalgic pleasure that a reader might at first assume upon entering the poem gives way to the speaker’s troubled sleep.
The word “sleep” appears six times in “After Apple-Picking.” It appears first in the conceptual block of lines 6-8: “But I am done with apple-picking now. / Essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.” This essence of winter sleep at the moment of exhaustion suggests a mode of sleep that would repair the speaker’s spirit after being subject to the endless, relentless rush of the day’s harvest activity, much as we might imagine the woodchuck’s sleep to do. (Were he awake, he would tell us.) The second occurrence of the word “sleep” comes in the middle of the Ice-Pane moment: “But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take” (14-17). In the field of this Ice-Pane vision, sleep takes on the connotations of suspension that mark what we could possibly learn about the woodchuck’s hibernation. The final mention of the word occurs in the closing lines:
One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. (37-42)
Again, as earlier in our examination of the word “but” in line 6, we are confronted with a mode of logical suspension through temporal (and lexical) condensation: the only distinction the speaker makes here between human and woodchuck sleep is the word “long.” Would a long woodchuck sleep be any less troubled than some human sleep? When, as we saw, the speaker earlier says, “I can tell / What form my dreaming was about to take” (16-17), that dream form is characterized by the endless stream of visual, muscular, and aural replay of the details impressed upon his sensorium. Is this endless replay the thing that troubles sleep? There is no hint of its potentially troubling nature at first, where it appears simply as a descriptive account of the dream form about to commence.
But the line immediately following this description begins to shade our evaluation of the day’s experience and its impact on the coming dream: “For I have had too much / Of apple-picking: I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired” (27-29). Again, the speaker slips in the explanation for a judgment that was never uttered: For, for this reason, because of all this—I have had too much, and that is why I am seeing and feeling and hearing these things over and over again in my oncoming dream state. This endless repetition is the result of being overtired by the endless fruits of my desire. If the woodchuck were only awake right now, he could tell me whether I might have a sleep like his, replenishing in its length. And that is clearly the picker’s hope, a hope complicated by the fear that this will be just some human sleep.
So does the overlapping temporal experience of the Ice Pane moment become just more of this sensory surfeit leading us into troubled sleep? Or does it offer some kind of redemptive recourse? In other words, if the single conscious temporal sequence of a daylong session of apple picking is enough to clog our dream flow with the endless, troubling repetition of sensory stimulation, wouldn’t the overlay of looping time schemes trouble our dreams all the more? If the poem in fact prompts us to ask these questions, it doesn’t in the end give us a definitive answer. For that, we will have to wait until spring and ask the awakening woodchuck.
But were I to hazard a guess in line with what we are given here, I would say that the Ice Pane moment of visionary extension gives us a sense of temporal experience and consciousness much more akin to the woodchuck’s than to the merely human’s dream-state. For the Ice Pane moment leads us out of the instrumental enchainment of temporal succession that characterizes modern life. In an era of seasonal celebrations and communal harvesting, humans might be said to experience something closer to the woodchuck’s sense of time and sleep and dream state. Rather than clogging our sequential moments of “productivity,” a life of overlapping temporal loops would provide for a much richer and deeper sense of lived experience, a state in which we could, perhaps, be more likely to cherish each apple that we hold in hand, worrying less about its relative cider value and more about its presencing to us as a gift of the earth in its overlapping rounds of time.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
After apple-picking
Sleep as fulfilment of desire or escape from the subliminal consciousness of suspended time?
Woodchuck as suspension—human sleep remains subjected to the imposition of instrumental temporal regulation.
Do “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods” work with or against the logic of this poem?
Recursivity as redemption?
Is simultaneity a gift or a curse?
Churning in the tidal reflux
Duality, multidimensionality
The poem presents us with an experiential comprehension of temporality as a nested superimposition of disparate animated time loops.
If something is “still standing still,” then the temporal complex that stages this continuing stillness reveals that stillness is never really still but always already flowing, suspended across the flow of things as the resolution of duality that the space of the between initially suggests.
In terms of the Ice-Pane Moment, the opening lines of the poem now place themselves within this centripetal presencing that stirs up the conventional expectations for verb tense we have been taught in terms of the relationships between past, present, and future.
We would have instead a centripetal draw of past and future into the present moment.
Simultaneity, a key motif in the poem, presents us with a mode of unending presentness of the past and a drawing inward of the future so that all relative time hangs suspended over the present expression of presencing.
Past and future are always fully present—presently presencing—in the experience we call the present.
a communal mode of human-and-animal earthen consciousness that the draining nature of the world of desire-turned-work eclipses
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