Tuft Of Flowers

This concept can also be explored in “The Tuft of Flowers”.

Notice how the narrator “looked” and listened” for the mower. He seeks communication with him but is met with silence and is left “- alone”. The use of the hyphen acts as a caesura to create emphasis on the word.

He speaks the following line to himself “I said within my heart” to emphasise his isolation.

Note the resigned tone of these lines “As all must be … ‘Whether they work together or apart.’” This idea of man’s isolation is extended to all mankind.

The butterfly leads the narrator to the “tuft of flowers”

Notice the personification “A leaping tongue of bloom”, as though the flowers are speaking to him and providing the communication that he sought earlier.

Notice the “scythe had spared” and then “bared” the flowers indicating the deliberate action of the mower who had “loved them thus” and left them “to flourish, not for us”. The mower has left the flowers for his own pleasure from “sheer morning gladness at the brim” – the sight of the flowers had filled him with a sense of joy.

It is as though the mower is communicating with him which again links back to his desire in the third couplet.

The high modality in “made me hear” suggests the importance of this communication between the narrator and the natural world “wakening birds” and the mower “his long scythe whispering to the ground” leading the narrator to “feel a kindred spirit to my own” and the discovery that “henceforth I worked no more alone;” which indicates a change from the start of the poem and his sense of isolation.

The reference to “wakening birds” suggests a kind of awakening for the narrator to the world around