Here’s a detailed analysis of Robert Frost’s poem ‘Mowing’; it’s tailored towards students taking the CIE / Cambridge A-Level syllabus but will be useful for anyone who’s working on understanding the poem at any level.
Great for revision, missed lessons, boosting analytical / researc...
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.
VOCABULARY
Scythe - a long stick with a sharp blade at the top, used for cutting grass or wheat
(tall long plants), symbol of harvesting, traditional/medieval. The grim reaper is
always pictured holding a scythe. He is a symbol of Death personified - in folklore
and traditional stories, when he appears it means someone is going to die.
Reaper - someone who cuts plants down with a scythe
Fay - an ancient word/archaism for fairy
Swale - a marshy hollow
Orchis - a wild orchid flower
STORY / SUMMARY
Only one thing in the woods makes a noise: the scythe chopping the ground. The
speaker seems to think that the scythe’s movement sounds like whispering, but he is
not sure about what it’s saying. He thinks it might be whispering about the sun and the
, impact of its heat. Or the lack of other sounds in the forest (it’s unusual/eerie that the
forest is silent). He says that the scythe definitely didn’t whisper about dreaming of
being lazy, or getting easy money from fairies and elves (meaning it is more objective
and honourable than a person, who would likely dream of resting or getting easy
money during their work).
There’s a shift in attitude in the ninth line, where the speaker seems more sure of the
scythe’s intentions. He concludes that it's satisfied purely by the honest work it does. It
has an ‘earnest love’ for its job and is created perfectly for the task of cutting the grass.
However, it does cut down wild orchids that get tangled up in the neat rows of cut
grass with their ‘feeble-pointed spikes’. It also scares a ‘bright green snake’ as it works,
so it has the capacity to damage nature or accidentally disturb it. The fact of its pure
love for its ‘labour’ is like a sweet dream. The final image is of the scythe whispering
again, leaving the cut grass to transform into hay as it dries.
SPEAKER / VOICE
The speaker of the poem is a farmer or harvester, he tells us about his tool - it is a
perfectly engineered piece of equipment that seems to love the job it was designed
to do (cutting grass to make hay). The speaker has a curious and equivocal
relationship with the scythe - he seems in awe of its precise and powerful nature, but
he also seems to suggest that there’s a kind of cold brutality to it as it tries to make
order from the chaotic and irregular natural world by transforming the grass into
neat rows of hay, while other parts of nature also suffer as a side effect of this
process.
FORM / STRUCTURE
● Title - The title ‘Mowing’ uses a continuous verb to suggest that the speaker is
having these thoughts about his scythe during the process of cutting grass.
Rather than feeling like the scythe and speaker are working together as one, the
speaker seems impressed with the scythe’s power and feels it has secret
knowledge to impart. This title also places the poem in the pastoral genre (see
context for more info).
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