Frost praises the unique sound his scythe
makes in the field beside the woods as
his first order of business in “Mowing.”
This sound is organic and mysterious—a
whisper rather than just steel on grass. The
scythe speaks to the farmer in the breathy
voice one uses to tell secrets. Frost, the
farmer, wonders just what runic sense
his scythe imparts to “the ground.” He
confesses that he himself is ignorant of
this secret, proceeding with speculation:
“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.”
In his listening to the scythe’s whisper
“to the ground,” Frost observes that the
scythe’s voice is as full of silence as it is
with sound, which is why it whispers.
Frost builds personal suspense as he
continues to think about this sound as the
source of a pastoral secret that only the
receptive “farmer” is privileged to hear and
understand. Turning next to ruling out
possibilities for the scythe’s sound, Frost
eliminates a few facile options for the
whisper: It is neither “the dream of the gift
of idle hours,” as any farmer might tell the
city dweller, nor “anything more than the
truth” since that would seem “too weak to
the earnest love” of the laborer in the field.
How fascinating that Frost writes “any-
thing more” instead of “anything less” here,
as if to say that embellishing the truth,
especially with regard to labor, degrades
the truth more than it enhances it.
Within the intense space of 14 lines, Frost
arrives at the answer to the mystery of the
scythe’s whisper in the poem’s penultimate
line. By combining two opposites, dream
and fact, just as he had earlier with sound
and silence, Frost delivers the earthly
news: “The fact is the sweetest dream that
labor knows.” While contradictory on the
surface, this line captures the ecstatic yet
empirical nature of work, exemplifying
what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the test of a
first-rate intelligence … the ability to hold
two opposing ideas in mind at the same
time and still retain the ability to
function.”
“Fact is dream to the laborer in the
uncut field,” the scythe whispers as the
farmer swings it, just as Frost “swings”
his lines so memorably on the page—
his “ground”—back and forth between
literal and figurative sense in a kind
of cognitive suspension where he’s
thinking and working at the same time
above the grass, lifting himself into
revelation. His embrace of realism
at the end of this poem betrays
the hard truth he would follow
the rest of his life, namely, the pursuit
of his own poetic harvest through his
hard labor as a poet—the pastoral
facts he would transform into truths
with his pen.
Despite several waves of the new
that have transpired since Frost’s
death in 1963 from postmodernism
to post postmodernism and the
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recent welcome explosion of multicultural
voices, readers continue “to hang” with
Frost in his native trees, woods, and roads,
where they still feel utterly haunted by his
narratives, monologues, and dramas.
Frost harrows his readers beyond horror
with terrors that compel even non-readers
of poetry to return to again and again for
more than just the mere, odd pleasure of
being frightened, but to discover
vicariously that our lives are extraordinary,
fragile, difficult, painful, bittersweet,
contradictory, ecstatic, and grievous. Not
that we didn’t know these things already,
but not in the terrifying, suspenseful way
that Frost conveys in his best poems. By
conveying the felt presence of human
experience in physical interactions with
the world, Frost divines passages to his
readers’ psyches through their bodies
first and then their minds and hearts.
We feel the abstractions he quarrels
with in our bones, whether it’s the
factual dream of labor or the limits of
human consciousness or the
affirmation of earth as
“the right place for love”
or the inconsolable reality
of grief. Frost’s language
finds us, enchants us,
suspends us, and
then leaves us
captured in our own
willful restraints.