Vermont Magazine | Page 24

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 22 VERMONT MAGAZINE 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.