The lines pursue a rather Shakespearean idea of a relation between sleep and death. The idea is articulated in Macbeth where sleep is seen as 'death's counterfiet' or in the sonnets where Shakespeare calls sleep 'death's second sleep'. Sleep is temporary death whereas death is an irrevocable and infinite sleep.
The entire poem After Apple-Picking by Robert Frost may be seen as the dream-laced thoughts of an old dying man who is ready for death with a sense of completeness but like all other completenesses, this one is also mingled with the lingering trace of a desire for life.
Towards the end of the poem, the speaker wants to make a distinction between the sleep which has enraptured him for the time being and the eternal sleep that is in the offing. But in tune with the radical unknowability of death, the difference can never be known because the one who knows (the woodchuck) it is always already departed.
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