Haymaking

After so much rain, a fine summer’s day, and a chance to get out into the hills. In the Derbyshire uplands, they were using the brief two-day respite from the rain to get on with the hay-making.

Stephen Duck was an eighteenth-century labourer poet. The title page of the seventh edition of his Poems on Several Subjects describes him as ‘Lately a poor Thresher in a Barn in the County of Wilts, at the Wages of Four Shillings and Sixpence per Week’. This is Duck on hay-making:

The Birds salute us as to Work we go,
And a new life seems in our Breasts to glow.
A-cross one’s shoulder hangs a Scythe well steel’d,
The Weapon destin’d to unclothe the Field;
T’other supports the Whetstone, Scrip, and Beer,
That for our Scythes, and these ourselves to chear.
And now the Field design’d our Strength to try
Appears, and meets at last our longing eye;
The Grass and Ground each chearfully surveys,
Willing to see which way th’Advantage lays.
As the best man, each claims the foremost place,
And our first work seems but a sportive Race.
With rapid force our well-whet Blades we drive,
Strain every nerve, and blow for blow we give:
Tho’ but this Eminence the foremost gains,
Only t’excel the rest in Toil and Pains.
But when the scorching Sun is mounted high,
And no kind Barns with friendly Shades are nigh,
Our weary Scythes entangle in the grass,
And streams of sweat run trickling down apace;
Our sportive Labour we too late lament,
And wish that Strength again we vainly spent.

Stephen Duck (1705–1756)

from The Thresher’s Labour (1730)


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