The Wood Pile, By Robert Frost

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The Frost in Frost In “After Apple-Picking” and “The Wood Pile” Robert Frost uses a winter setting to show the end of humanity and sense hopelessness and lost time. “After Apple-Picking” uses winter as the end of a season. Frost wrote, “And held against the world of hoary grass. / It melted, and I let it fall and break” (11.12-13). Through-out the night sheets of ice were created because how cold the coming winter has made it. The speaker saw the "hoary grass”, but it was distorted by the “glass” or ice covering it (11.10, 12). The ice and water are killing the plants for the coming winter. In turn it is also symbolizing the coming end to morality because of the perpetual need to sin. Robert Frost does not specifically allude the end of any particular subject, but his use of symbols suggest the end of humanity. The illustration of picking of apples and of apples fallen to the ground alludes to the fall of man. Apples represent sin in many literature pieces and therefore his need to fill the “…barrel…show more content…
The "frozen swap one gray day" illustrates a bleak gloomy moment, because it nearly convinces the narrator to “turn back from here” (1.1, 2). He went to say that no one has ever been successful but for years and it stood waiting “And piled - and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see” (11.24-25). This lost time can also be seen when the narrator explains, “No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. / And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, / Or even last year’s or the year’s before” (3.26-28). In the end Frost wrote, “He spent himself, the labor of his axe, / and leave it there far from a useful fireplace/ To warm the frozen swamp as best it could/ with the slow smokeless burning of decay” explaining that the only way to fight the hopelessness and lost time symbolized by winter is constantly pushing forward
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