How does "After Apple-Picking" by Robert Frost make you feel emotionally?

This poem by Robert Frost calls to mind someone who has been writing poetry for a very long time, since it seems to compare a season of apple-picking to an entire career of writing poems. And yet Frost wrote this poem rather early on in his career. So, in terms of the way the poem makes me feel on an emotional level, that knowledge that Frost is looking ahead towards how he might feel after many years of being a poet fills me with awe and a sense of wonder. That depth of thought and consideration of the future is remarkable in a relatively young writer.

I also feel a variety of emotions when reading the lovely imagery of this poem, because it depicts a rich sensory experience in very detailed terms. The descriptions of the sights, sounds and actions of apple-picking are offered in a straightforward way, but also in a way that inspires a sense of longing or nostalgia. The various senses (sight, sound, smell) are engaged in ways that allow the reader to really engage on a sensual level with the experience being described, and I think this appeal to the senses helps to underscore the emotions felt as well. In other words, by appealing to a reader's senses, Frost primes them for reception of his other, more subtle ideas about aging, regret, loss, death, etc.

This passage in particular is rich with sensory detail: the scent of apples and the sight and texture of frozen water compared to glass:

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, 

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. 

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.

This passage also conjures an image of a mirror (or "glass"), and the "strangeness" the poet describes here may indeed refer to his imagining his own feelings about aging and the legacy of his work, years into the future. Nature functions here as a mirror and the idea of a looking glass as a portal into the past or future is also at work. The poem has a sense of sadness, but also a sense of hope, because the ritual of apple-picking is one that repeats each year.