The speaker of this poem seems to be a simple person, a farmer, probably, since he (or she) is out mowing grass with a scythe beside some woods. At the beginning of the poem, we understand this person to be a hard worker out in the sun, which is not a vision that inspires the feeling that there's a whole lot of intellectual activity going on. However, just a few lines in we start to understand that there are some wheels turning inside that sweaty head and that there is genuine value in the work that is being done on a spiritual and artistic level, not simply a physical one.

To further emphasize that this isn't just some meat-headed gardener, we get the only speck of specificity in line 12 where the flowers are named. It's like being pricked with the very tip of that scythe when we realize not just how sharply focused the speaker is on his task but also how sharp his or her intellect actually is.