Tim:
I have written a mowing poem -- mowing with a tractor, however. As you wouldn't be the least surprised to learn, it owes a lot to Frost.
By the time Frost wrote "Mowing" there wasn't much serious scythe work being done. Up in his corner of the world there were a few holdouts, but mostly the business of farming was becoming automated and noisey. Just as he went to New Hampshire partly out of nostalgia for a life he had never really lived, so he celebrated the old ways of harvesting -- from which he had never had to make a living. The old ways really did bring the worker closer to his work, really did allow at least the possibility of becoming absorbed into the rhythms and other sensations of nature and himself. (Please, no one needs to remind of the economic necessity that drove farmers to technology, and no one needs to tell me that mowing by hand brings moments of insight punctuating hours of drudgery!)
Among other things, "Mowing" is a reminder of what we inevitably lose even as life gets indisputably better.
RPW
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