Exactly how steamy is this poem?
PG
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 course, Frost wasn't trying to be sexy, which is good because this poem is room temperature at best. It's not completely lacking in sexual references though, since line 12 includes both orchises (a type of orchid) and snakes. Orchids are not the most modest of flowers (just ask Georgia O'Keefe) and snakes are…well, you get where we're going here.
Still, it seems that Frost is trying to tell us that sex is the easy part, but "earnest love" requires work that's just as hard as mowing the lawn. That's about as much of a turn-on as an actual snake.