Mowing Analysis

Any time you come across a poem of 14 lines, Shmoopers, you should hear a sonnet alarm going off in the back of your head. In fact, "Mowing" has features of both a Petrarchan sonnet and a Shakespea...

The speaker of this poem seems to be a simple person, a farmer, probably, since he (or she) is out mowing grass with a scythe beside some woods. At the beginning of the poem, we understand this per...

The narrator is out in a field beside the woods—pretty simple…or is it? While it may seem like the field isn't that complicated, one of the points that Frost likes to make with his poems is tha...

As we read through the poem, the soft whispering of all the S sounds becomes almost hypnotic. Just count the S's at work in the first two lines:There was never a sound beside the wood but one,And t...

Like the poem itself, the title is short, direct, and simple. That doesn't mean that it's a boring title, though. In this case less is simply more. That's because, just like a good little black dre...

Frost was often criticized for writing about things that critics and other poets felt were too mundane for poetry. He often wrote about everyday life, particularly aspects of farming in New England...

Frost only gives us 14 lines to grapple with, but it's not all perfectly flat terrain here. There are a couple of head-scratching lines toward the end ("fact is the sweetest dream"). Ultimately, th...

If Elinor White had a crystal ball to see Frost's amazing success as a poet later in life, she might not have actually turned him down the first time he proposed. (Source) What do you do to help sa...

If there's nothing sexy about mowing the lawn, then every movie with a bored housewife watching her sweaty, muscular gardener through the living room window with a steamy gaze must be wrong. Of cou...