Sonnet
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 Shakespearean sonnet, making it neither—or maybe both, we're not sure.
Let us explain. The poem's one-stanza structure consists of an octave, followed by a sestet. We also get a volta, or turning point, in line 9. All of these structural elements check a lot of the boxes of a Petrarchan sonnet.
Like a Shakespearean sonnet, though, the last two lines provide the poem's punch. However, line 12 is the only line that can really be considered in keeping with the typical Shakespearean sonnet
meter: iambic pentameter. Check it out:
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
You should hear a repeating pattern when you read that line out loud: daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM, daDUM. That's the line's five iambs at work (penta- means five). You really won't hear that elsewhere in this poem, though.
As well, the poem's rhyme scheme falls short of the typical Shakespearean, or Petrarchan, pattern. It's ABCABDEC DFEGFG, where each letter represents that line's end rhyme.
So what gives? Was Frost just bad at writing sonnets? Not exactly—there may, in fact, be multiple reasons why this sonnet is doing its own thing. For starters, if you can't use poetic license to write a poem, when can you use it? But that's a bit of a cop out. You could also argue that there's a kind of tension between the monotonous pattern of the mowing that the poem describes and the way that the poem itself refuses to fall into any sort of predictable pattern. Instead, its variations on the sonnet form could be subtle nods to the work of a poet in his "idle hours." The imagination behind this poem seems to peek out from behind its predictable form, as if to say "There's a whole lot more going into this poem than just a dull back-and-forth from one line to the next."