Complete Text
There was never a sound beside the wood
but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the
ground.
What was it it whispered? I know not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the
sun,
Something perhaps, about the lack of sound— 5
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was not dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed
too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 10
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Summary
Ostensibly, the speaker muses about the sound a scythe
makes mowing hay in a field by a forest, and what this sound might
signify. He rejects the idea that it speaks of something dreamlike
or supernatural, concluding that reality of the work itself is rewarding
enough, and the speaker need not call on fanciful invention.
Form
This is a sonnet with a peculiar rhyme scheme: ABC ABD
ECD GEH GH. In terms of rhyme, “Mowing” does not fit into either
a strict Shakespearean or Petrarchan model; rather, it draws a little
from both traditions. Like Petrarch’s sonnets, the poem divides
thematically into an octet and a sextet: The first eight lines introduce
the sound of the scythe and then muse about the abstract (heat,
silence) or imaginary (elves) significance of this sound; the last
six lines present an alternative interpretation, celebrating fact
and nothing more. But “Mowing” also hinges, like Shakespeare’s sonnets,
on its two final lines. In terms of meter, each line comprises five
stressed syllables separated by varying numbers of unstressed syllables.
Only one line (12)
can reasonably be read as strictly iambic.
Vocabulary
A fay, as one can probably tell from
context, is a fairy. A swale, in New England, is
a low-lying tract of land. Orchises are terrestrial
orchids.
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?
