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harrowing

Farming
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

The agricultural act of breaking up and smoothing soil with a harrow; metaphorically used in verse to describe distressing agony.

Detailed Definition
In farming, to harrow is to drag a toothed implement over plowed ground to break clods and smooth the soil. Hardy uses the word in a rural, workaday sense that fits the poem’s quiet agricultural scene.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Only a man harrowing clods” depicts the farm task of breaking and smoothing ploughed soil; “The tractor harrowed the field into dark furrows” updates the labor with machinery; “Harrowing clods, she watched the crows lift from the loam” joins work to landscape; the adjective harrowing, meaning distressing, derives from the rough tearing action of a harrow
Additional Notes
The farming term in the line “Only a man harrowing clods” is specialized agricultural vocabulary that many modern readers may not know.; Found in the poem, In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' by Thomas Hardy
Also Known As
distressing tormenting agonizing troubling
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