Sunday Literary-ism

Robert Frost was one of our greatest poets, although somewhat underappreciated in modern times. One of the themes he returned to frequently was the social and metaphysical character of work. See, e.g., “Mending Wall.”

Another great, although earlier and less well known poem, “A Tuft of Flowers,” is about a guy who goes out to rake a field which someone else had mowed earlier in the morning:

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

…

I looked for him behind an aisle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, and had been,--alone.

While he’s working, though, he notices a bunch of flowers sticking up all alone in the middle of the mowed field. They make him think of the guy who was there earlier, and who must have decided to leave them there.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
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.”

Legal work can be lonely. You spend a lot of time staring at a computer screen. The poem reminds me that there are (sometimes) ways you can feel a sense of connection through work, even when the work itself is solitary.