Robert Frost was a man who went through many difficult obstacles in his life. In his poems he uses a lot of guiding metaphors to express such difficult times. This poet, who can also be considered a realist, believes that things must collapse. According to Frost, “every metaphor fails somewhere. That's all its beauty. It's touch and go with the metaphor, and until you've lived with it long enough, you don't know when it's going to end. You don't know how much you can get out of it and when it will stop paying off. It's a very living thing. It’s like life itself.” His poems use metaphors to give spatial orientation to main concepts; he gives them meaning by showing a journey that goes to heaven and then returns to earth. For example, in an essay written by Frost himself, he explains that for students to understand the true meaning of thinking, they must understand that it consists simply of being able to say one thing in terms of something else “… To tell them that it is to place your feet on the first rung of a ladder whose top protrudes from the sky. This quote is ideal as we look in more detail at three poems by Frost in which metaphors of orientation are used and also relate to the symbol of heading to heaven and then returning to earth. In particular, “After Apple Picking,” “Birches,” and “The Silken Tent” are writings that demonstrate a misconception of a subject; However, there is actually another meaning behind it. When we begin to look more closely at “After Apple Picking,” it is evident that every line of this poem contains a representation of metaphor. For example, "My long two-pointed ladder crosses a tree/still towards the sky/ and there is a barrel which... in the middle of a paper ......a photo/images of trees, we are given “…a powerful, dynamic drama of climbing birch trees, of a boy testing the limits of his daring, keeping his balance in precarious positions of his choosing. Too far from the city to play baseball, too alone to be challenged by others, he challenges himself. (Faggen 160) Along with the description of this boy, the poem also contains a combination of memories, imagination, and a little bit of reality. From the first lines, Frost shows imagination when he explains that in his mind, he likes to believe that a boy bent the birch trees. Reality then kicks in immediately after the thought when he realizes that only ice storms can bend them. A metaphor Frost uses to compare birch trees “…like girls on all fours who throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun...”