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?
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- andforth 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.