How does the poet use allusion in the poem, After Apple Picking?

The apple orchard has a Biblical resonance – one can read it as an alternative to what would be mankind’s fate if he decided not to pick the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden. In that reading, “After Apple-Picking” comes across as exceptionally fatalistic. Even in the alternative represented by the speaker’s choice to not act, humankind seems doomed to unhappiness. By picking the fruit, Adam and Eve are banished from the paradise of Eden, but the speaker, in choosing the alternative and resigning himself to sleep is left with a dreamy sense of unfulfillment. He realizes his own lack of free will, as suggested by how the apples, “No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, / Went surely to the cider-apple heap / As of no worth,” representing how all humans end up in a state of death and disintegration, regardless of personal choice and circumstances (34-36). He is a left with a sense of his own microscopic insignificance as he finds his dream might be entirely ordinary, “just some human sleep” (42).