By Robert Frost (1913)
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.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Analysis
“Mowing” is a hymn to honest labor and to the truth discovered through work. Alone in a quiet field, the speaker listens to his scythe whispering to the ground, rejecting all dreams of “easy gold.” The poem’s loose sonnet form and hushed consonance embody its ethic: precision, focus, and restraint. What the scythe says cannot be paraphrased — it speaks through rhythm and motion, not ornament.
Frost contrasts this “fact” with the seductions of fantasy. The line “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” unites realism and imagination: truth itself becomes the poet’s dream. “Mowing” transforms agricultural craft into art, suggesting that both depend on attentive repetition. The poem’s final gesture — leaving the hay to make — honors completion without flourish, the beauty of enough.