"Mowing" by Robert Frost

Winter time and the mowing season is well and truly over in my neck of the woods, hence the smaller number of posts (why not check out my green woodwork blog SteveTomlinCrafts which gets more active in the autumn and winter – life is seasonal).
This part of the year gives me more time to think about mowing and research scythes, haymaking and cereal harvesting which I enjoy almost as much as actually working with the scythe. From time to time it turns up some gems, like this poem by Robert Frost.

Mowing

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.

Robert Frost

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