By Robert Frost (1913)
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
“As all must be,” I said within my heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”
Analysis
“The Tuft of Flowers” transforms solitude into fellowship. The speaker comes to turn grass after a mower and expects to work alone, yet a butterfly leads him to a small tuft of blooms left standing by the earlier laborer. That act of preservation bridges absence and presence. Frost’s rhymed couplets glide with pastoral calm, their symmetry mirroring the moment when separation gives way to connection.
The poem’s insight — “Men work together… / Whether they work together or apart” — is less sentimental than it sounds. The rhythm of shared effort, the continuity of intention, binds people who never meet. Nature becomes a silent mediator of human kinship. In this brief pastoral, Frost discovers a communal spirituality rooted in labor, humility, and beauty noticed by chance.