What the Scythe Whispers
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, 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.
, A Boy's Will (1913)
The scythe whispers, but the poet “knew not well” what it said. What Frost discovers in the mowing is harder to name than the physical act itself. There’s communication happening between worker and tool, between effort and earth, that operates below language, below conscious knowing.
We often think of labor as what stands between us and what we want. The obstacle before the reward. Frost refuses this framing entirely. “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” The word “fact” surprises here. We expect dreams to offer escape from facts, but Frost finds them intertwined: the resistance of grass against blade, the rhythm of swing and cut, the pale orchises noticed and spared in passing. The fact is the engagement itself.
When tools begin to whisper back, when the work itself becomes a kind of conversation, something shifts. The output matters less than this ongoing exchange. Perhaps this is why the prospect of generating without laboring feels strange to so many creative people. They sense that something essential lives in the doing that may not survive translation into the done.
The scythe whispers; it does not speak. There’s a quiet knowing in work that resists being made loud, made efficient, made instant. Frost leaves the hay “to make” at the poem’s end: unfinished, still becoming. Whatever the fact is, it happens in present tense.