The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Comment:

This is a strange poem, but then again, America is a strange place, even if everyone professes to understand it. The name “America” does not occur in the poem: “the land,” “ours,” “she” and the ambiguous-enough “the gift outright” all substitute. The last word of the poem is “become:” does America even exist yet?

A relation between existence and possession is posited. “The land” – again, not “America” – “was ours.” At a later point, “we were the land’s.” Possession, at the least, marks existence, even if it does not properly name what is: “our land,” “her people.” Reciprocal possession might be love, but note “before” – reciprocal possession starts with one claiming possession. This creates the problem of time: did anyone make a claim on us? Did we make prior claims?

On that latter question, we most certainly did: there are two distinct sets of colonies and traditions, Massachusetts and Virginia. Our claim to those plots was based on the English claim to us; do we want to say England loved us? Part of the poem seems to refute this idea. If love is reciprocal possession, then “Possessed by what we now no more possessed” seems to imply England had nothing like true love. But that’s a shallow, lazy way out given this: The deed of gift was many deeds of war. And Frost is well-aware of the significance of “life, liberty and property” to our heritage, the precursor of “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Possession seems to be the possibility of love by mid-poem, though. After all, “we” were “withholding” “something,” and we felt enervated. Possession is about strength; when we feel weak, we are experiencing the most base reaction. This is not love, not yet. This is only “salvation in surrender.” We are brought to the final of 5 sentences, which is itself 5 lines. “We” are “the gift outright,” it seems, but all the doubts the modern Left has about America are there: “vaguely realizing westward” implies we did not and do not know where we are going. “But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become” implies that leaving the Old World came at enormous cost: can we ever progress, or are we forever marked by frontier crudity?

What is unsaid is vital: we have a name for the New World, and it is ours, all of ours. As many of us were slavers, that many more died to emancipate. The lack of the name is the will to sacrifice, and that is the authentic piety of love. We have surrendered to the land, it takes us where it will; there is a body/soul relation throughout the poem, and a comment on what spirit is in “unstoried,” “unenhanced.”

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

The trees are bare, but not quite withered yet. It is damp and getting darker, but there is a crispness outside that I wish to match in my work. Winter is coming methodically, working in clearly defined increments.

I’m anxious, not sorrowful.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

Anxiety doesn’t talk. She just stares at you, and once you think your mind is off her, she’s still there, staring.

In a way, she’s comforting. It feels at times like you’re loved, held to some higher standard. Even when worrying about one’s immediate security, there’s the concern of doing the best one can now, showing gratefulness for all that’s been given and will be given.

It’s not the worst thing to know someone is watching.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Anxiety takes no solace in Spring; her solace is in the certainty of decay. Fear is her motivator: maybe this desolate, faded, weighted condition can be transcended for a moment, and if so, then you’ve accomplished something. If not, all goes to rot anyway.

In this, anxiety is linked with sorrow: both deny the whole purposefully. And they think they have something to teach us.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Those more attuned to the whole – those of us who are human – know implicitly the importance of “my sorrow,” “my anxiety.” They’re parts of a whole we’re trying to piece together. In Sorrow’s case, she should be allowed to speak: she’s only articulating what would weigh too heavily otherwise.

I think anxiety needs to be spoken to, but not badly. Anxiety may deny Spring initially, but she doesn’t deny hope. She’d like to be resolved, and the only question is how. The trick is to move her away from fear towards something rational. Small victories, then, matter far more than bigger accomplishments. Thanksgiving wasn’t about conquest in the New World, but more about getting through the harshest of times.

Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud-puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths – and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

Comment:

What sort of teaching occurs at well-curbs? The religious imagery of kneeling, experiencing light, and then using that light to see into a reflective darkness gives this poem a seriousness it might not have. Is life on the farm so boring that you have to hang out near the well and try to look at the bottom? There’s nothing else to do? We have seen before that pastures are meeting places of a sort. But still, one wonders if Frost grew up on the weirdest farm known to man.

The water here gives one thing only to most people, but it is interesting. They look into the darkness with total conviction that they are seeing deeply, and they are rewarded. Turns out that the center of the universe is yourself, if you look carefully enough. Down there in the well is you smiling back at yourself, and not just any “you,” but the new and improved version. The one that will hang out with angels in the next life and sit on clouds and be crowned with leaves and maybe even eat from trees.

Is that surface all that is there? Are all our searches for truth doomed to giving us back what we think initially? Is the only religion that exists the one where we delude ourselves into thinking we’re humble, when we really want knowledge/power/immortality and read those “wants” as the moral truth underlying the world?

Our narrator kneels wrongly once. One is supposed to kneel with one’s hands at the next pew, not arms on top of what is ahead – you’re not supposed to lean forward and use the kneeler as a crutch. You’re not supposed to look anywhere but down, in the spot you resided at. Prayer demands focus, not curiosity.

Our narrator kneels wrongly and guesses (“discerned, as I thought”) there is something beneath the surface conception of things. Whatever it was, it was white, and he only got a glimpse of it. “Water came to rebuke the too clear water” – God will never flood the Earth again, but our conception of Creation could still necessarily depend on the existence of Chaos. The fern, of all things, is responsible for blotting out – blotting out what, exactly?

We move from “white, uncertain, something more” to “truth, a pebble of quartz,” and “for once, then, something.” The central issue is the concreteness we move to. Before, the picture of “me myself in the summer heaven godlike” had visual elements that corresponded to this world, but it was just an image. Now the image may have dispelled, just for a second, and we want to know what else from this world could underlie the image. “White” is a color and could describe any number of objects. But Truth is only one object. “Uncertain” has been resolved, in a sense – it could be “a pebble of quartz,” something that can be fashioned for human use if retrieved. And then, the temporal progression of the last element – “something more” is only accessible in the context of what has been. Therefore, “once,” meaning not just this moment, but all the other moments prior like this one; “then,” meaning this moment, leading up to something futural; and finally that “something,” a concrete thing or even an experience crowning the whole endeavor.

Images are all there are. The question is where human seeing is directed, or where the images truly lie. That ripple shook nothing but our speaker’s sight temporarily; there are somethings Chaos cannot deny.

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

Comment:

Everything you wanted to know about Ovenbirds – the actual bird having a nest like a dome, an enclosure seemingly separate from the rest of nature, is probably relevant to this poem.

The poem itself is divided into six sentences. It begins by introducing the bird: when and where it occurs, and how we notice it. Then there are three sentences that begin “he says,” where the bird interprets nature’s motions for us. After that, we are given a sentence describing the bird’s uniqueness, and finally a sentence telling us the bird’s question.

Where the bird is located ties into the time of year: the sun is literally too bright and hot to dwell in always. It also “makes the solid tree trunks sound again:” when was the last time trees made sounds? More than likely spring, when life was just reemerging, not becoming abundant and spreading itself far and wide. The oven bird seems to mimic us in our separateness from the seasons: we are not wholly removed from nature’s cycles, perhaps we are even put in a particular place by nature. But we still seem separate from the rest of life, if only because of memory.

After all, we see as this one bird “sees” – maybe it doesn’t know anything, maybe it is only focusing our attention. We remember when the leaves were more alive and when flowers were more plentiful. How beautiful trees that fruited once were, and how even they have lost their appeal. And we are most sensitive to the dust being over all.

The allusion to the Fall is in the center of the list of motions, but it is not the first observation of the bird. Old leaves and disappearing flowers are what first confront us: it is the smallest of changes, perhaps even the possibility of change, that brings us to the wrong tree. In this poem, we get there, but are we tempted? Maybe on those sunny days a moment overcast we’re out plucking fruit, but maybe not. The overriding concern is not morality, but mortality – how is it we even care for something like justice when we are a part of an inevitable cycle of decay?

What happens next and finally is most curious: the bird is distinguished from other birds, brought closer to us in its asking a question, and yet ultimately distinguished from us too. We’re left standing with the question of our own mortality, the Ovenbird itself is immortal. It does not cease because it knows “in singing not to sing.” There is only one thing more permanent than Being, as you are well aware: Nothing.

So what do we make of a diminished thing? Ultimately, we see nature’s cycles and know that with every Fall, there is a Spring. And we know that isn’t our lot – the changes we experience are far more permanent. That marks us as a part of nature that diminishes.

But the Ovenbird is immortal inasmuch as it echoes Nothingness. Nature is beyond us because all it does is diminish: it only rises again to waste away again. Are we ourselves really a diminished thing?

The Ovenbird is a loud, annoying bird, bugging us in our shelter. It’s our question, not his, and we make something of a diminished thing every day.

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Commentary:

I suppose formal criticism would ask, “How do we get from the first line to the last line? How does a brook being gone inform us that love exists, in an important sense, only in the present?”

Well, something is curious about this brook. It has been “sought for much” even after it has run out. By whom? I think we can assume our speaker is doing the seeking. He considers two possibilities for where the brook has gone: 1. It has gone groping underground, taking with it life that makes itself manifest in a joyful noise, & 2. It has gone underground, but come up again, this time in lousy plant life that the wind throws around.

What do we make of these two possibilities? They’re both bleak, obviously. And both speak to the lack of volume of water. It is the volume of water that allows for animal life to congregate. It is the volume of water that allows for resistance against the wind. (Frost is very subtle about his baptism imagery – cf. “The Pasture.” Also, in “The Pasture,” note how companionship and a baptism reference are tied. One person alone does not baptize.)

The water was there in the Spring, that time of love. Now it has taken the music of nature – something we lovers pay far too much attention to – away. And if it is still around, it is only manifest in something weaker: mere plants, plants, that like thoughts, proliferate after a failed relationship, but are useless against the moods that are like the wind, against the circumstances that are like the wind.

“A faded paper sheet of dead leaves stuck together by the heat” reminds us that this poem exists, that the writer/speaker has remembered, and remembered what the brook was, and what its full significance was. Those who see the brook now could not possibly believe the magic of what went on there once. But the writer preserves the best of times, even when the heart aches. And hence “We love the things we love for what they are” – this brook only truly mattered when it existed. The writer remembers it because love was there, not because the “brook” is anything now. One wonders, if love is indeed sacred, about the temporality of the divine.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

Commentary:

In beginnings there are endings. To allow something to return to its natural purity, a purity that might never have been afforded it by circumstances if not for an intervention, seems an ending and a beginning. Certainly it is an ending, but as it was never the case before, it is another sort of beginning: a true beginning, that which is an origin as opposed to an original. The clearing of water mirrors the clearing of the soul, and whenever purification of water happens, it is a new life.

But an invitation is not merely being expressed for one stanza. We are presented with infancy and frailty in the next stanza, and it is always curious how at the end of life we revert in many ways to how we were as infants. To give aid at the end of life, mere human aid, sometimes hurts more than it helps. Monuments of unaging intellect are frail in other ways besides physical, and a former independence cannot be replaced by a salve. The speaker’s action, again, is extraordinary. That calf would not leave on its own; it would not attempt to go to a better place if it were not called and fetched.

The invitation this poem gives, then, is for us to share with the speaker the whole of life. What is perhaps most puzzling is the speaker: his actions seem above the human, metaphorically speaking, yet his understanding is very human. Aquinas held we understood the divine through analogy only: human rule implied the existence of divine rule, for example, but what human rule actually taught about divine rule we needed to know from Revelation alone. There was only one Truth, but it had to be grasped from without if it were not given to us.

Something like that might be going on here. Our speaker is pious in the midst of tending a pasture, but the analogy is to be wondered at more than resolved.

Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about -
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world’s embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight,
With smell of burning on every plume,
Back past the sun to an earthly room.

His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.

Comment:

At first it seems Love clings to earth, which is strangely not capitalized as Love is. We realize why “earth” is not capitalized when the second stanza comes about: Love actually “strains” in the “world’s embrace.”

The earth has no need of walls that shut out fear, nor does Love strictly speaking. The only creature that could leave the same print on snow and sand and turf would be Man. Man, who is loving, loves through straining with the world, with the earth. But such straining comes at a price: it seems like Man so conceived is unfree, perhaps a slave. His goal is security, after all.

Thought has wings, and one has to wonder if thought is a representation of Man. If Love could be said to be not Man himself, but animals instead – perhaps we could say the “hills” are the walls that divide geographic zones – then maybe we can say Thought is angelic. The trouble with this is twofold: the anthropomorphic description of Love in the stanzas above, and the fact that Love and Thought directly relate via the problem of being enslaved or being free (“ankles”).

Thought seems angelic, that’s what is crucial: in reality, it is more like Icarus: those wings could collapse at any second because of the heat of the sun – again, that is not capitalized either. Sirius, the dog star, is capitalized, and we need to wonder about Thought having a more personal lover than Love itself.

The issue is that the freedom Thought has is not the whole issue: it is easy to romanticize eros and say that devotion is everything, and the freedom Thought has is mere wandering. But here, we have a portrait of Thought as devoted. Through creating ideals, one learns to differentiate, and appreciate goods as they are in a hierarchy. Thought, from Sirius’ vantage, sees the whole world.

In fact, he is more intimate with the whole world than one would suspect. If the Platonic metaphor holds for this poem, then one must remember how in the Republic, the guardians, the “spirited,” the ones who would defend the walls and march to war, would ally with the philosophic out of sheer love of them.

The narrator tempts us to dismiss Thought with three arguments: 1) Thought has to return with his tail on fire to earth, 2) We don’t know what his gains specifically are, 3) through “simply staying,” Love “possesses all in several beauty.” I think what I have put forth above explodes two; we can conjecture that the gains of Thought are not to be taken lightly if we look beneath the surface of the verse. Furthermore, if #2 falls, so does #3: Yes, Love does possess all in several beauty by being at rest. But that truth is too literal to take seriously – does Love realize the diversity encompassed? Distinction is precisely what Thought has in its favor, and that absolutely contrasts with the depiction of Love in the first two stanzas, which seems to be, no matter where one is, a rejection of a fear and an unconcern with whether “straining” comes about voluntarily or not.

It is the first argument that the narrator puts forth that is the problem, the eternal problem: how the angelic and the beastly could be reconciled.

This is just amazing, amazing stuff. I wish I could write like this.

From the article above:

“The difference between expense and waste,” we find Frost writing early on, is that “Waste is where only God can see the sense.” This is from a rough draft of the poem that would become “Pod of the Milkweed,” with its famous line, “But waste was of the essence of the scheme.”

Now I cannot find a copy of “Pod of the Milkweed,” and for all I know, it could have a first line which says “Idiots consider me a ‘terrifying’ poet, but really, I’m not, and I don’t think waste is something that man creates most of the time, or that it is the essence of a universe which doesn’t make sense at all.” So if anyone can get that online fast, it would help for future posts on this topic, certainly. Furthermore, that complication means everything I say here is going to be incredibly speculative, even more contingent on “over-reading” than most of my other thoughts.

For now, we have to make do, though, and trust our author. Both expense and waste involve the external: there is a motion, and then there is exhaustion. The question is whether Creation is a waste, as only God can see the sense in it. But if we make that move, what about “expense?” It seems like there are motions which exhaust which do make sense. How can sense be explained in a universe whose overarching logic does not exist?

I think a moment’s reflection shows us that both Dickinson and Frost are teetering on the atheistic (I think Dickinson is an outright atheist personally, but I haven’t read and commented on all her poems and letters, so I’ll keep that suspicion to myself), because they engage this question and come up with an answer that actually isn’t too bad. We can see the answer reflected in this passage from the review:

If waste is the essence of the universe, the universe can only be explained or justified from a superhuman perspective; but the superhuman, Frost always reminds us, is also the inhuman. The uncomprehending gaze of humans at the inhuman, and vice versa, is the dramatic center of some of Frost’s best poems. Think of “For Once, Then, Something,” where the poet sees a glimmer at the bottom of a well and asks, “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?” Or “The Most of It,” where the poet by a lake-side cries out, hoping to awaken “counterlove, original response,” and is greeted only by “a great buck” who swims into view and then stumbles indifferently away.

The issue is that just as we look for sense, with greater powers of reasoning than anything inhuman, perhaps God is looking at us to see if anything can be made sense of. But that isn’t the whole story, because human beings weren’t created to be alone. The difference between expense and waste is where the energy is diverted, perhaps. To “expend” isn’t to just work towards a goal, since goals have to be communicable to ourselves, and by implication, have to at the very least make sense to other people (whether or not people accept them is another story). I would argue that if God can create, for Frost, then 99% of the universe is waste, but 1% is expense, but such expense is not coming from the God/man relation, but the relation of men to other men. Waste is more or less coming from man’s relation to the inhuman, probably.

To make a long story short, since God commands we love one another, the logic behind theism collapses into atheism (same with the logic behind atheism, even from this normative perspective. The arguments are antinomial). For it doesn’t matter if the world was created with an order, it looks like a focus on the present only can lead to realization of what is highest. Unfortunately, since such a powerful line of thought comes from reflection on the present, one has to wonder how delicate this wisdom is, and about the possibility of communicating it throughout the ages.

That’s where I think the full problem lies with the “inhuman” – the inanimate, the bestial, and the eternal. For we see others clearly in the present, but can our conventions be grounded in each other alone in order to build a future? We need recourse to something else: perhaps a form of matter which doesn’t perish, or an actual change in our instincts, or finally, a transcendent providential force which works to remind and guide us. The issue is that the deeper wisdom keeps getting lost, and lost again: people are really good at going through the motions, and exhausting themselves, and not caring what the proper end is. So it doesn’t seem like the inhuman can aid the human in the highest endeavor.

What’s worse is that “sense” from “expense” gives us a tool that might help us realize love in the here and now, but to preserve what is best, well:

Frost is known as a master of metaphor, and many of his poems take the form of extended metaphors. Yet when he writes, “I doubt if any thing is more related to another thing than it is to any third thing except as we make it,” he shows how the power of metaphor can turn on the poet, plunging him into a world of sheer perspectivism where there is no essence, only likeness. If we can make anything resemble anything else, then we are doomed to perish from the very excess of significations.

The tool that is metaphor depends on people’s ability to relate. But who truly relates? We have to assume people relate in order to move to more significant themes. This is all well-and-good when dealing with friends, but when dealing with larger groups of people, especially groups that in their ignorance can be very dangerous unknowingly, the ability to communicate the highest truth might not exist at all. And I need not say anything about the poet’s ability to convince himself of the highest things via metaphor – there, I think, is the case that one has uncovered something truly terrifying.

Technorati Tags: frost, atheism, poetry

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As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less than two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

Commentary:

The hill in the first stanza has many ways one can go up and down it; I assume a gate implies that a path runs perpendicular to the path our speaker is on. It is then quite remarkable that he finds someone on the exact same path he is on, and that seems to be the prelude to love. Love is depicted in the first stanza as continual turning: he turns and discovers her, the mingling of footprints suggests that they are walking in circles, around and around a section of the hill – incidentally, Purgatory, in the Divine Comedy, is a mountain one walks up to get to Paradise (more on Frost and Dante).

The turning of summer walks, though, changes with in the second stanza; the parasol points, not merely circles, and it demands a unity that is not to be. I wonder if she is younger than he; she’s coming up the hill as he’s coming down, yet her face is pointed downward, like she knows something – or believes something – he doesn’t. She wants whatever is at the top, which might be connected with what she smiles at in the dust. He, on the other hand is returning to the earthly, and knows her love was not True, not because she wasn’t sincere, but precisely because she was sincere.

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 know 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 not 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.

Commentary:

The comment on this poem over at SparkNotes is actually quite good. The argument there goes as follows: this poem is about poetry and what it should say, and how we should listen. You can see this from the central lines “It was not dream of the gift of idle hours / Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf,” which are chastening us for even thinking of being “idle” or attempting to imagine fanciful things. Further, the poem asks us to contrast an inaudible whisper, the product of labor, with speech. Which has the greater claim to truth? Which does poetry reflect better – the whisper, or articulate speech?

I think the SparkNotes writer is really good, but too clever by half. Every poem can be said to be a comment on poetry. Let’s go back to the text, and see what the more immediate themes that affect us are.

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 know 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.

“Beside the wood” is critical. Dante is lost in a dark wood before he emerges and sees a hill he cannot pass. When he sees the hill, of course, there is light. Our narrator, on the other hand, is bombarded with light, having moved nowhere. What is notable about the light is not how it makes things visible, but beats down on the narrator and his scythe. Maybe the scythe is muttering its frustration with being out this hot day.

There is also only one sound, that of the scythe mowing. There is no wind or breeze. The only “wind” comes from the motion of the scythe, and is man-made. Compare with Inferno, where wind – the passions that sway us to evil and ignorance – is divine punishment.

Now we can move to the overarching theme, of “whispers” versus “speech.” Dante’s quest is a quest for knowledge. Hence you can compare Dante and the Odysseus of the Inferno, and derive ideas that stand for the rest of the epic. Knowledge implies that “light” doesn’t oppress, but enlighten. Its coming about requires an escape from winds. And, of course, knowledge has a lot to do with articulate speech.

Here, our stationary laborer creates winds, and only mentions light as a physical impediment to his work. Our narrator is emphatically not interested in knowledge, and his work is literally that of the Grim Reaper’s. His work echoes his death, maybe even testifies to it. The eternality of knowledge is contrasted with laying the swales in rows. Labor comes from the fact we must die, strangely enough. Usually we would say it comes from the fact we want to live better.

And now I think you can see something even stranger. This narrator may not be Dante, but he is no idiot, despite what seems like willful ignorance.

It was not 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.

Our narrator does not need knowledge, which does emerge from idleness (*whistling*), and does look for easy solutions to material problems. The SparkNotes misses the importance of “gold.” Gold is not fantasy money. It has been valuable in all times and all places. Poetry is not created to make gold. But 99% of knowledge came about from some attempt in the spirit of alchemy.

The “truth” is much harsher. It is connected to “love” which is connected to death. The scythe tells all. And in that labor, that labor of death, flowers are beheaded, and snakes run away. The SparkNotes writer makes the absurd suggestion that Frost means by “snake” what orchis in Greek means. There’s no doubt there’s sexuality here, but it’s not that crude. Flowers represent sensuality, and the snake represents the moment when the sensual became corrupt, aspiring to be higher than God. Again, there are overtones of the Divine Comedy here – Dante travels, meeting Beatrice at the end of his journeys. Was the whole enterprise flawed, because it did not adequately separate sensuality and beatitude, as Frost’s narrator does?

Frost’s laborer is a Protestant born and bred. He does not care for the “idle” pornographic musings of bad poetry commentators.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Frost’s narrator does not need knowledge because he has the “truth,” which is predicated on the “fact” of the whisper. It does not matter that it was inarticulate and makes no sense. It’s connected to labor, and there is a happiness there, presumably for the laborer.

I think there’s a really dark joke at play here. The “fact” is “the sweetest dream labor knows.” Does the laborer have the “sweetest dream?” The scythe whispers, and what’s weird is that it doesn’t make hay, but leaves the hay to make. Creation is outside of the laborer’s purview.

Which brings us back to the title. The title is “Mowing.” Our SparkNotes author wants us to take this as a sexual comment. That’s utter gibberish. The question is “What do our labors create,” and the half-answer is “they really don’t create anything, they destroy more than anything else, and maybe they even destroy us.” But there’s another answer, too, which is that in labor there is certainty, and thus the big issues are not far from the surface. It’s very easy to forget in Dante that we’re going to die, despite the fact we are encountering dead people all the time. We have lost focus on ourselves, while mocking or admiring others in a fantasy world.

The fact of mowing does point to knowing, as the whisper does imply the existence of speech. But the fact itself is not a trivial fact, even as it is very problematic.