Answer: The speaker goes to a field to turn the grass that has been mowed there. He feels lonely. Then, he sees a butterfly, which leads his eyes to a tuft of flowers that the mower left standing. The joy that must have led the mower to admire and spare the flower sis transferred, through the sight of the flowers, to the speaker. This awakens in the speaker a sense of kinship with the mower. It banishes his loneliness. He feels now as if he were working with the mower side by side.
“A Tuft of Flowers” is written in heroic couplets, with some variation from a strict iambic foot. All rhymes are masculine; the majority of lines are end- stopped. This, in part, gives the poem its marching, old-fashioned sound. (A few archaic-sounding words add to the effect: o’er night, henceforth.)The heart-apart rhyme of lines 9-10 gets recast and repeated later in the poem. Two additional end-words, alone and ground, are repeated.
Explanation: Published, in A Boy’s Will, a few pages after “Mowing,” “The Tuft of Flowers” revisits the labor of haymaking. Whereas the mower of the former seems mesmerized by his labor, wondering at the sound his scythe makes, the grass-turner of the latter begins with a pervasive sense of loneliness. It is a loneliness more profound than the temporary loneliness of a morning spent unaccompanied; rather, it is the lone lines of the entire human condition: The speaker is lonely “As all must be.”
