The love that lays the swale in rows

There’s a line of verse I’m always coming back to, and it’s been on my mind more than usual these last few months:

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

It’s the second to last line of one of Robert Frost’s
earliest and best poems, a sonnet called “Mowing.” He wrote it just after the
turn of the twentieth century, when he was a young man, in his twenties, with a
young family. He was working as a farmer, raising chickens and tending a few
apple trees on a small plot of land his g...