Two of Life's Great Pleasures

I remember walking with my mother in her old age in New Hampshire, walking out to her clothesline with a basketful of freshly-washed laundry, and she saying "Hanging laundry out to dry in the fresh breeze is one of life's great pleasures." I am sure that she always thought as she hung out the laundry, of my father's building that clothes line for her many years ago.

The symbolism of washing one's clothes and letting the fresh air blow through them causes many reverberations in my soul.

Doing the mowing around my parents' place in New Hampshire was one of life's great pleasures for me. Mowing carries a great symbolism, too: of death and life and maintenance and renewal. The symbolism and scents and sounds and sights combine with the sheer facticity of the labor and the everlasting truth of Robert Frost's line, in one of his poems about mowing, that goes "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." Then there is the subtle but substantial sociality of it that he brings out in the sequel poem, "The Tuft of Flowers."

Mowing

by Robert Frost

   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.

My father, who had a lot of New Hampshire in him, once visited Frost's classic farm in Derry with me and said of it, "I may not understand Beethoven but I understand this."

 

Robert Frost's Farm in Derry, New Hampshire

The Tuft of Flowers
by Robert Frost

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.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

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.'