Hay-making

I'm sitting on the back deck watching our neighbors make hay in the field just down the hill. They mowed the meadow Tuesday and raked it into windrows Wednesday and Thursday, and now they're driving balers slowly in circles to gather up the hay and form it into giant round bales.

This mechanized mowing is very different from the process Robert Frost described in "Mowing" (read it here), with its easy iambics and soothing sibilants echoing the rhythm of the scythe. The best way to teach the poem would be to take the students out to a field of standing timothy and hand them each a scythe so they can hear "my long scythe whispering to the ground," but I don't teach Frost during haying season and even if I did, where would I get 24 scythes? Instead, I encourage them to pronounce scythe like sigh, and then I tackle the closing line: "My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make."

"To make what?" is the obvious question, except when I am blessed with a farmer or a 4-H member in the class. You have to make hay while the sun shines, I tell them, but what does that mean, making hay? It's just grass. You just let it grow and then cut, dry, and bale it. Where is the making?

The farmer makes the conditions right for the grass to grow and watches the weather to find a stretch of dry, hot days, but he can't make the weather cooperate. He mows the grass (with a machine rather than a scythe these days) and makes it lie in windrows so the sun and wind can transform the grass into hay. Too much moisture and you've got compost, which won't feed your cows--but the farmer can't make the sun shine or the wind blow, and he certainly can't prevent a sudden downpour from ruining the whole process.

The mowing, raking, and baling machines rumbling around the meadow make it look as if the farmer is the active force in the process, making hay while the sun shines, but more important is his passive submission to the forces of nature--walking away, letting the grass lie, leaving the hay to make, period. In a peculiar active-and-passive process, the farmer makes hay or the hay makes while drying in the meadow.

And I shall be telling this with a scythe someday ages and ages hence: two idioms diverged in a meadow and I, I chose the one that whispered by, and that has made all the difference.

  
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