Tuf of Flowers Commentary

narrative voice and the man before him are not connected, or so the narrator thinks.  As the narrative voice is about to start his work he bitterly remarks that the man before him “…had gone his way, the grass al mown, And I must be, as he had been –alone” thus he separates himself even more  from the first man(7-8). Frost uses the simile of comparing the narrator’s state to the state of the first man to demonstrate the rooted belief of the narrator of how every man is on his own, fulfilling his own mission alone. In the first couplets of the poem Frost is mainly operating with the narrator and his first impressions, however as the poem progresses Frost shifts the tone of the poem and focuses more on nature.Having now created an atmosphere of cold aloofness coming from the narrator, Frost makes a sharp alternation with the focuses of the poem, from the narrator- man, to a butterfly-nature.  As the narrator is about to immerse into the solitude of his work “swift there passed [him] by, on noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly “ ( 11-12). “Noiseless wing” is an aural imagery used by Frost to convey how insignificant the narrator thought the butterfly to be at first and thus not believing that its actions should to be taken seriously.  And as the butterfly makes the narrator perturbed for few moments as he puts it he  “thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry” (19-20) but the butterfly led him on to see the small tuft of flowers spared by the first man. Frost uses consonance of “toss” and “grass” to further connect the two words and portray how the narrator was so blindly devoted to such trifle issues. Yet, as the butterfly makes him ponder his attention lingers and with the discovered tuft of flowers his perception of surrounding changes.With the discovery of the tuft of flowers the narrator seemingly awakens into a different reality because he starts to “hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground”(31-32). Frost uses the two aural imageries to fully impact on the readers just how ‘noisy’ it became for the narrator as he became aware of elaborate patterns of life around him. Frost also personifies scythe because before it was presented as weapon of devastation, and yet now it almost lovingly whispered to the ground.  As the narrator became alert to the surplus of existence around him he also noticed that everything is interlinked and connected    “…and [felt ]a spirit kindred to [his]own’ so that henceforth [he] worked no more alone” ( 34-35). The spirit the narrator is talking about is an allusion to the first man, the one who spared the tuft of flowers; these flowers were the bridge between the narrator and the first man. They both appreciated their beauty and how nature benefited from them; now sharing this common trait the narrator realized that “Men work together…Whether they work together or apart” (39-40). As the narrator comes to a peaceful understanding of the fact that all men work towards one goal –success of human race, he accepts the world around him and intertwines himself with the nature and humanity.Through displaying nature and it’s complicated relations Robert Frost proves that although many humans may perceive themselves as separate beings they too contribute to a large pool of humanity; no matter how small they are, in the end all the human acts interweave with each other and embed into each other’s paths. Just like the narrator and the man who mowed the grass complete each other’s works by doing their separate jobs and not really giving it much thought of how they actually do ‘work together’.