"Whispering to the Ground": The Environmental Message of the Scythe

Abstract

“A good scythe,” Wendell Berry famously wrote, is an “excellent” and “satisfying hand tool” (391). It is also a remarkably ubiquitous literary image. While references to hoes, shovels, rakes, or pitchforks are rare, scythes (and, to a lesser extent, sickles) abound in both poetry and prose.1 The unique nature of mowing with a scythe has led to its association with a variety of interrelated themes. Reading examples of this imagery, used over hundreds of years of western literature, in the context of the actual experiences of contemporary mowers, allows us to see this tool as a powerful symbol of integration, signaling a way forward as we confront the environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. The scythe, of course, carries a conventional symbolic value, that of time's passing and mortality. Both Father Time and the Grim Reaper bear scythes. The rhythmic quality of the swing echoes time ticking away, the falling of the grass in the scythe's path suggests the inevitability of death, and the swish and slash of the reaper's blade will get us all. “Death thou art a Mower too” concludes the speaker in Andrew Marvell's “Damon the Mower” (Line 88), and many writers have used this image to personify time as the great equalizer. Shakespeare's sonnet 12 reflects on the inevitable death of “sweets and beauties,” inevitable because “nothing ‘gainst Time's scythe can make defence” (11, 13). Sonnet 60 uses similarly emphatic language to make the same point: “nothing stands but for his scythe to mow” (12). Like beauty, social status offers no protection because, in the words of an anonymous song, “Princes pass, as grass doth fade away” (“Ay Me” 4).