Mowing by Robert Frost

Poetry is a very compact language that attempts to convey powerful feelings and imagination. The key to understanding a poem is to analyse its rhythm, sound, and imagery, and the overall implied meaning. To truly understand a poem and its meaning, you will need to read over it a few times in order to fully experience its interpretation. We are going to look at mowing by Robert Frost and attempt to examine the narrator's intention and feelings about the scythe which was a crude machine for mowing grass.

Mowing by Robert Frost

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 knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no 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,

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.

Author Robert Frost

The mood and atmosphere of the poem is one of love and peace between the speaker and nature. The meter of the poem is five stressed syllables with various unstressed syllables, line twelve is what is described as iambic. The sonnet was written at a time when grass was mostly mowed by hand, using what was called a scythe.

In the first eight lines the speaker is attempting to work out what the scythe whispers.. In reality of course the scythe is not capable of whispering or speaking. This causes the speaker to consult his own imagination. So the whispers are simply a metaphor of the speakers own thoughts. In line 8 he\she clearly rejects anything that could be considered as supernatural such as elf or fay. Lines 1 and 4 rhyme with the words one and sun, which possibly represents the speaker and the provider of life the sun.. In lines 3 and 8 the words self and elf also rhyme, this helps to divide the fantasy of an elf with the reality of the speaker. There appears to be a message of destruction and re-creation. The speaker is cutting the grass ready for the next stage of haymaking. This demonstrates the destructiveness of nature and its ability to reproduce. The narrator makes a connection between humanity and nature. This is shown by the description of the calm and tranquillity of the surroundings. The speaker is also allowing himself to ponder on humanity's control over the natural world. Even though the speaker is killing the nature around him/her, he or she is also aware of the part humanity plays in this cycle of life and death.

This particular sonnet has a peculiar rhyme scheme, which does not fit into a Shakespearean or petrarchan model, but rather takes a little of both. The first 11 lines are broken up with commas and dashes, and semi-colons which gives the anticipation and more to come. The full stops at the end of the last 3 lines show the speakers final thoughts. At the end of the poem what the scythe actually whispers remains unknown. This leaves the reader to look for metaphorical meanings, because scythes cannot talk or whisper.