Not that the rhythm is unrelieved. It has its "accidentals." You repeat a stroke that has not pleased you, with a curious sense of pleasure at the interrupted movement which has yet not changed the theme; you nip off a tuft here or there as the singer throws in a stray flourish to garland the measure; you trim round the trees with the pleasant feeling that you can make this big thing do a little thing so deftly; you pause to whet the blade with the hone. But all the time the song of the scythe goes on. It fills your mind and courses through your blood. Your pulse beats to the rhythmic swish—swish—swish, and to that measure you pass into a waking sleep in which the hum of bees and the song of lark and cuckoo seem to belong to a dream world through which you are floating, bound to a magic oar.
The sun climbs the heavens above the eastward hills, goes regally overhead, and slopes to his setting beyond the plain. You mark the shadows shorten and lengthen as they steal round the trees. A thrush sings ceaselessly through the morning from a beech tree on the other side of the lane, falls silent during the heat of the afternoon and begins again as the shadows lengthen and a cool wind comes out of the west. Overhead the swifts are hawking in the high air for their evening meal. Presently they descend and chase each other over the orchard with the curious sound of an indrawn whistle that belongs to the symphony of late summer evenings. You are pleasantly conscious of these pleasant things as you swing to the measured beat of the scythe, and your thoughts play lightly with kindred fancies, snatches of old song, legends of long ago, Ruth in the fields of Boaz, and Horace on his Sabine farm, the sonorous imagery of Israel linking up the waving grasses with the life of man and the scythe with the reaper of a more august harvest.... The plain darkens, and the last sounds of day fall on the ear, the distant bark of a dog, the lowing of cattle in the valley, the intimate gurglings of the thrush settling for the night in the nest, the drone of a winged beetle blundering through the dusk, one final note of the white-throat.... There is still light for this last slope to the paddock. Swish—swish—swish....
The Temple Press, Letchworth
ENGLAND