On Mowing

“A one-sentence interpretation of this poem by its author is, ‘The youth takes up life simply with the
small tasks.’ Wrote T. K. Whipple, in Spokesmen: ‘Robert Frost’s is preeminently a farmer’s poetry.
His familiarity with nature and with objects is not, for all his deservedly famous observation, that of
the observer or spectator, but that of the man who has worked with them and used them. His
acquaintance with them is more intimate and more intuitive than that of the onlooker. A grindstone
to him is not a quaint object with rustic associations, but something which has made him groan and
sweat; a scythe does not remind him of Theocritus but of the feel of the instrument as he swung it.’ In
‘Mowing,’ the poet is concerned with suggesting to the reader his ‘intimate and intuitive acquaintance’
with a swinging scythe--his sensing of significance in an ordinary task. The verse form, since it is a
sonnet with its own individual rhyme-scheme, and since its iambic rhythms are adjusted to those of a
conversational tone, represents the modified Modernism of the author’s versification.”
Walter Blair

This poem is a perfect example of agrarian pastoralism, an American tradition that began with Letters
from an American Farmer (1782) by Crèvecoeur and Notes on the State of Virginia (1794) by
Jefferson, then includes Emerson, Thoreau, Cather, Faulkner and others: (1) the setting is the farm,
the “good place”; (2) the farmer is the “good shepherd” who cares for animals (making hay
presumably to feed livestock) and the land; (3) he has an “earnest love” of hard farm work, a
puritanism integrated with his pastoralism; (4) his work of necessity makes him an objective Realist
who must seek the truth and face facts in order to survive, as opposed to a Romantic dreamer; (5) he
is not a materialist who values “easy gold”; (6) he has a spiritual relationship to Nature as a source of
divine truth; (7) through this relationship he has attained natural harmony, independence,
fulfillment, peace and a sweet life.

Typical of Frost, the diction is plain. It is the voice of the common man and the tone is conversational,
questioning, searching, humble--moving from honest uncertainty through experience and insight to a
lesson or moral. The first lines establish the pastoral setting beside the wood--the quiet and the
whispering. The scythe is a traditional emblem of time and death. The farmer participates in a
seasonal cycle of planting, cultivating and harvesting. He is part of the natural order, even while he
also imposes a human order on the environment: he cuts down flowers out of place in his field and he
scares away a snake in the Garden.

The series of four strongly accented syllables in “scared a bright green snake” convey the quick
movement of the snake and emphasize it, evoking the myth of the Fall. The bright green of the snake
indicates that it is part of Nature and behaving naturally. This farmer is using a tool that makes him
seem a timeless representative of the human race living in harmony with Nature while also mastering
it. Pointedly, he is using a scythe, a primitive tool that makes little impact on the environment, rather
than a machine in the Garden. He is more evolved than Adam, figuratively speaking, in that he is too
disciplined, focused on his work and untempted by an Eve to notice the snake, which is no danger and
offers him no apple. He scares it away without trying.

His scythe whispers to the ground: “What was it whispered? I knew not well myself.” The poem is
about his relationship to the ground of being, or Nature. He asks himself what his mowing, the
whispering, means--and ends with an answer. First he speculates that the sound is inducing mere
sensations, feelings due to the heat or the quiet. He knows it was no dream of leisure nor “easy gold at
the hand of fey or elf.” He dismisses Romance as wishful exaggeration: “Anything more than the truth
would have seemed too weak.” He begins to feel the truth as he swings in a natural rhythm: “The fact
is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” From experience he learns that the best reward for a thing
done is having done it, just as Emerson said. The last line of the poem repeats “My long scythe
whispered” as if the whispering is a prayer affirming his faith in creative Nature: “and left the hay to
make.” Michael Hollister (2015)
MORAL
-beauty and fulfilment is to found in truth and the world, not in lofty imaginings.

-labour and working hard is a way of with that truth.

-story can be seen as PROBLEM: scythe's whispering is inaudible. SOLUTION: the whispering is not
important. Thus, the farmer is inspired by the scythe not to focus on his imagination, and instead on
the value of hard work and the satisfaction that can be gained from living in the real world.

-imagination is not dismissed as completely inferior, as it was through imagining what the scythe was
saying that the fanner came to this revelation in the first place. Similar to Frost's poem "Birches"
which says "Earth," or the real world, is "the right place for love" - yet imagination and nostalgia in
that poem are valid ways of making the real world a little more bearable.

SCYTHE
-biggest symbol for the moral of this poem: living in reality is better than living in imagination

-metal tool with a sharp blade on the end - the perfect symbol of unromantic labour and harsh reality.
The harshness of truth and the fact that living in the real world is not easy is presented through
farming being creation through destruction. The scythe's "earnest love" for labour is the morally right
point of view in the poem but it's not perfect - it scares a snake and kills flowers.

IS "MOWING" ABOUT THE RIGHT WAY TO WRITE POEMS?

-"Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak" = poetry should describe the of the real
world - it needn't expand into lofty imaginings and fantasy. This goes with Frost's unusual choice of
subject matter for his - humble countryside life and everyday situations - when most poets wrote
about weighty topics and supernatural myths etc.

-The scythe "left the hay to make" - could alluding to how at a certain point in the creative process, the
creation no longer belongs to the creator. Once it's out in the world anyone can draw their own
meaning from it, out of the control of the original author. By presenting the scythe's perspective as the
morally right one, Frost could be telling other poets/creators to accept this fact.

As a statement about art in general and 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 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 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 for meaning. In our labor of
reading poetry, should we only read for facts, and not venture to interpret or project, because "the 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?

The scythe is speaking to him - what he is working towards will that much sweeter / more fulfilling
due to the effort that he is putting in. Something to be enjoyed and appreciated in the everyday
aspects of life in rural New England, He doesn't need to draw. upon the fanciful or imaginative for this
 he doesn't l00k for easy solutions to material problems.
The scythe doesn't dream about inactivity or reward for labour. Labour is ifs own reward. as depicted
through the metaphor and supernatural imagery,