Commentary
Full of alliteration and internal rhymes, this poem has a pleasing sound.
"Mowing" is about mowing, but it is also a meditation on art, poetry, love, and
how to live. It also--like so many of Frost's poems--possesses a winking
element of wordplay (an element often overlooked by critics).
As a statement about art in general and poetry in particular, the poem tells us
that the Real, the common voice, the realities of work and labor--these are
sweet; poetry inheres in these things and need not be conjured through willful
imagining, flights of fancy (elves), or an abandonment of the everyday. In
fact, anything "more than the truth" is debilitating to art. As a statement
about living, the poem seems to say that working in the world, embracing and
engaging its facts through action, is a prerequisite for knowledge about it.
Truth comes before understanding, and truth must be worked for. And so the
challenge for the liver of life--and for the poem, and for the reader of
poetry--is to work to embody that physical, factual, sensory truth.
But the poem also raises questions about the very act of culling a poem for
meaning. In our labor of reading poetry, should we only read for facts, and not
venture to interpret or project, because "[t]he fact is the sweetest dream that
labor knows"? Or should we nonetheless try our hand at analyzing, at extracting
meaning where meaning is not clearly stated?
We cannot read just for facts, just for surface verisimilitude--for if we do,
this poem's question becomes moot. The question is, "What did the scythe
whisper?" But if we stick to facts, we must admit that scythes do not whisper
anything. They lack the human quality of speech, whispered or otherwise. The
poet, in building his poem around a whispering scythe, has given us "more than
the truth." But do we blame him for this contradiction? Can the writer, the
reader, the mower in the field, help but look behind and within the facts for
something more than the just the facts? This listening for whispers seems a
basic human trait. And more than a universal aspect of human frailty, it is
essential to the whole project of poetry and art. If poetry works toward an
articulation of truth, and this truth is factual, then a great paradox sits at
the heart of poetry. For some artifice, some imaginative leap, must precede
that articulation of truth. Someone must hear a scythe and wonder what it
whispers, must be willing to think in terms of whispering scythes--in terms of
"more than the truth"--before he can build a poem on the rejection of this
notion, before he can maintain that scythes whisper nothing more than the fact
of their own whispering. Without someone listening for whispers in the first
place, there is no poem; without the labor of the poem, there is no
articulation of the "sweet dream" of fact.
But there are many other ways to read this poem, and there are other aspects to
note.
Consider the idea of creation through destruction, the making of hay through the
mowing of grass, and all the connotations this holds for the creative artist.
Also the idea of leaving the hay to "make" suggests that at some point,
after great labor, the making of hay--or poetry--is out of the laborer's hands.
It must simply "make" itself. The reader must also consider that to evoke
reaping and scythes is to also evoke the connotations of the rapid passing of
time, and of death, that often accompany these tropes. An anthropomorphized
Time holds a sickle and does a bit of mowing in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:
"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending
sickle's compass come." Is the speaker in Frost's sonnet mowing through his
life and, realizing its ephemerality, wondering what is of most importance?
Then, there are overtones of sex and love. The act of mowing was once (and
perhaps still
is, somewhere) a known euphemism for making love. But for Frost, the scythe's
"earnest love"
is apparently harmful, too: It scares a little snake (yes, Freudians) and cuts
down flowers. Frost was an able classicist and likely would have known that
orchis is taken directly from the Greek word for testicles.
Finally, pay careful attention to the sound of the poem. The swinging, back-
and-forth motion of the scythe emerges in lines like "What was it it whispered"
and "Perhaps it was something.../ Something perhaps." Frost wrote about his
desire to write with "the sound of sense"--meaning the experience of hearing
itself, the perception captured and enacted in words. He comes powerfully close
to this with the repetition of "whisper" and "scythe," and with the alliteration
of w's and s's that seem to form their own whispers and sighs.
