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furrow

Archaic Terms
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A long, narrow trench cut in the earth by a plough, used for planting seeds; also used figuratively for lines or wrinkles.

Detailed Definition
Furrow enters poetry from Old English "furh," denoting the groove left by a ploughshare in tilled ground. Its dual literal and metaphorical meanings make it unusually versatile: a furrow is simultaneously a mark of agricultural labor and an image of time's passage inscribed on a face or landscape. Shakespeare, Keats, and Tennyson all exploit this duality. In Keats's "To Autumn," the furrow represents the fullness of harvest time; elsewhere, furrowed brows signal thought or age. The word's sound—its initial friction and rolling vowel—enacts the physical dragging of the plough through resistant earth. As a poetic image, the furrow connects human toil, seasonal renewal, and the inevitable marking of time upon all surfaces.
Example
Example in poetry:
Keats's "To Autumn" closes with the stubble-plains, the harvested furrows implicit in the imagery of the gleaned field — the marks of the plough persisting through the harvest as evidence of the year's foundational labor; Virgil's Georgics give detailed technical instruction about the correct depth and direction of the furrow, establishing the tradition of treating agricultural precision as worthy of serious poetic attention; A poet might write "she read the field like a book of furrows, each line a sentence in the farmer's argument with the resistant earth, the text running from hedge to hedge"; The furrow's dual meaning — the ploughed groove and the wrinkle of age or thought — gives it unusual semantic range, connecting the agricultural and the personal: a furrowed brow is the face's own harvest, the accumulated ploughing of years of thought and weather; Seamus Heaney's "Digging" establishes continuity between his grandfather's spade cutting clean furrows in the Turfough ground and the poet's pen making its own kind of furrow in the white field of the page; The furrow as the basic unit of agricultural writing — the line the plough makes in the earth that corresponds to the line the poet makes in verse — has made it one of the richest metaphors available to poets thinking about their own activity.
Additional Notes
Furrow is one of the most extensively documented and discussed terms in the lexicon of agricultural poetry, and students should approach it with awareness of its very long history. The connection between the furrow and the poetic line is ancient and pan-cultural: in many traditions, the word for "line" in poetry derives from the word for a ploughed line in a field. In English, "verse" itself derives from Latin "versus," meaning "a turning" — the moment when the ploughman reaches the end of a furrow and turns for the next. Students should understand this connection not as a mere metaphor but as evidence of a deep conceptual link between agricultural and poetic cultivation. The furrow's dual meaning — the groove in the earth and the wrinkle on a face or brow — opens into a meditation on time's cultivation of the human body that is available in any poem that uses the word. Seamus Heaney's "Digging" is the essential modern poem to read in this context. Related terms: tilth, ploughshare, coulter, harrow, sward.
Other Meanings of “furrow”
Also Known As
drill groove trench rut forrow Sheugh channel striate
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