Mending and Apple-Picking
The first thing that caught my attention in Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" was the first word, "something." What is it, exactly, that doesn't love a wall? I think this "something" is part of our human nature, that part of us that longs for companionship, friendship, love.
Throughout the poem, the wall keeps the speaker and his neighbor apart. I believe the wall represents prejudice, fear, and enmity, which are all barriers to the "something" that wishes to bring the speaker and his neighbor together.
It seems to me that the speaker finds the wall unneccessary, or at least questions its purpose, while the neighbor believes that the wall is necessary, because that is what his father (and tradition) have taught him:
Good fences make good neighbors. ... Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.
Ultimately, the wall is repaired as fast as it is torn down, leading to an endless cycle that segregates the speaker and his neighbor.
Reading Frost's "After Apple-Picking," I had the sense that his poem represented a man at the end of his days, troubled with thoughts of what he never achieved.
My first clue was the "two-pointed ladder" bit in the first line, which symbolize something like horns in my mind (perhaps alluding to the Devil, or a devilish soul). The next clue came in the idea of "apple-picking": apples (a biblical reference, methinks) could represent pieces of wisdom or knowledge (or perhaps even sins).
The speaker says he is "overtired," giving the impression that he is near death, and explains that he had to try to handle the apples carefully, or they would fall out of his grasp and be wasted. This could allude to the idea that he wasted some of the wisdom he was given, and the fact that he wasted some of the apples will "trouble" his sleep.
If the apples represent sins rather than wisdom or knowledge, the speaker may be trying to allude to the fact that although he "desired" them when he started to pick the apples, he is now troubled with the consequences that he fears he will meet in death. Perhaps he feels damned.