Frost enjoyed dialogue and conflict not only from his hatred of the tyranny of utopia but also from a deeper fear of solitude. Two of Frost’s best lyrics, “Mowing” and “After Apple-Picking,” force us to see not only the individual laborer but also the limits and futility of man alone in the universe (one of the laborers uses a “long scythe” and the other a “long two-pointed ladder” as an instrument of perception), straining at the limits with no response from man or God. In “Mowing,” cutting the hay and leaving it “to make”—that is, to dry in the sun—are some of the fundamental forms of farm labor. The poem has been taken as a work about poetry—about the satisfactions of combining work and play through the creation of a comforting sound and rhythm, and this is partly true. But as in almost all of Frost, the expectation and even first appearance of comfort cannot hide what so troubles the laborer’s daydreaming. The loneliness of the speaker is more than apparent in his opening line: “There never was a sound beside the wood but one,/And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.” The image of the cultivated field next to the wood suggests an unhappy Arcadia or garden, one devoid of anything but the man-made sound, incomprehensible even to the laborer himself. If the sonnet often attempts to resolve into comfort or affirmation of love, both are hard-won here. As a figure of the seeker looking for revelation in nature, the poem seems to provide only an ironic echo of the voice crying in the wilderness in Isaiah 40: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field . . . the grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of God shall stand forever.” But here the only voice remains the whispering of the laborer’s scythe, an instrument of order and destruction. This garden demands labor, already has technology, and encompasses creation as well as time and death for which the mower himself has often been a metaphor. “Something” keeps the scythe from “speaking,” and we learn that it may be “something about the heat of the sun,” suggestive of the power of the environment and the fact that man must labor by the sweat of his brow. Outdoor schooling tells more. The mower’s “earnest love” lays the swale in rows and cuts down “feeble-pointed spikes of flowers/(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.” To a farmer, the flourishing of flowers represents an ironic curse of cultivation; flowers grow stronger as the cultivation continues. (In “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” the farmer feels cursed that “The very nature of the soil was hot/ /And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,/Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain/Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.”) The flowers represent beauty and frustration. And their “feeble” presence as well as the failure of a “bright green snake” to remain camouflaged suggests the tentative presence of all life forms in a world of randomness and waste. All these “facts” prevent the mower’s “dream” from growing too great, and the speaker arrives at the complex epiphany of acceptance: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” The facts hold only the hint of possible transcendence and are inextricably related to the senses and sensuous experience. The following line continues the action of labor that does not look too far into the future but only to the next step in the process of harvesting: “My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make,” which may be all that can be said or done for the moment. With its unusual rhyme scheme, skeptical tones, and haunting sighing sounds, the poem allows for pain but does not drift into resentment—rather into a hard-won acceptance.