Whispers

It may come as a surprise that something as quiet and gentle as a whisper could be a powerful force, but it most certainly can be. Many wise, interesting, and powerful people are soft-spoken—the Dalai Lama, Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, or Noam Chomsky, just to name a few—and yet they are able to get their thoughts across with impressive clarity. We suspect that it has a lot to do with the fact that, if you speak softly, your audience is forced to shut up and listen closely. It's a pretty solid strategy, one that the scythe has decided to take in the poem. If the speaker were in a loud place or making a lot of noise, then he never would have heard what the scythe had to tell him that day.

• Lines 1-2: The scythe is making the only sound, but it's still a soft one. The tool isn't shouting whatever message it needs to tell the speaker, and it doesn't expect that it needs to do more than whisper.
• Line 3: The speaker recognizes that the reader is going to be curious about what the scythe is whispering, but he has to admit that he doesn't really know. The fact that he says he doesn't know "well" makes a difference here, as opposed to simply saying that he doesn't know at all. What he's saying, and what will be reinforced later, is that this is his truth. The scythe might whisper something different if someone else were mowing. He's also letting us know that it's more of an intuitive belief than something that has been researched, prodded, or dissected in order to understand it.
• Line 6: Here the speaker speculates that the scythe is whispering because it's already so quiet. This is about respect. The scythe is respecting nature by not disturbing its quiet and it's respecting the narrator by not disrupting his focus as he mows.
• Line 14: The final line reminds us that the scythe is whispering and laying the cut grass down in neat rows to be gathered up later for hay. It brings us closure to remember that, no matter how big and profound the last few lines may have been, it all came from the pure, simple act of mowing.