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windrow

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 line of cut grass, grain, or hay raked into a row to dry before being gathered; also a line of leaves or debris pushed by the wind.

Detailed Definition
Windrow describes the organized rows into which mown grass or grain is gathered by raking—left to dry in the field before being collected into haycocks, ricks, or sheaves. The word combines "wind" (because the rows are arranged to maximize air circulation for drying) with "row," creating a term that describes both a practical agricultural arrangement and a visual feature of the harvest landscape. In poetry windrows appear as images of the organized abundance of harvest—the golden rows lying across a field, the landscape temporarily reorganized by human labor into these parallel lines of drying crop. The windrow is a transitional form: the cut crop not yet stored, still belonging to the field but already removed from it, waiting in its ordered rows for the next stage of gathering and storage.
Example
Example in poetry:
The windrow's visual character — the long parallel lines of cut grass or grain lying across the mown field — provides one of the harvest landscape's most distinctive geometric patterns, the field reorganized by the raker's art into these ordered rows; A poet might write "the windrows lay across the August field like the lines of a vast and patient text, the hay drying in its sentences, the afternoon air reading them slowly with its warm breath"; In harvest poetry the windrow represents the transitional form between the standing crop and the stored harvest — the organized but not yet preserved form of abundance, the cut grass still belonging to the field but already removed from it; The windrow's dependence on good weather — the hay must dry in these rows before it can be gathered, the farmer watching the sky anxiously as the windrows lie exposed — makes it an image of agricultural vulnerability and the farmer's dependence on forces beyond their control; Hardy's Wessex poems attend to the windrow as part of the visual landscape of the traditional hay harvest, its orderly lines contrasting with the chaotic activity of cutting and raking that preceded their formation; In contemporary pastoral poetry that uses the technology of traditional farming as both subject and metaphor, the windrow's organization of scattered cut material into parallel rows serves as an image of the ordering activity that converts raw experience into usable form — the poem itself as a windrow of the mind's harvest.
Additional Notes
Windrow provides students with an excellent example of how agricultural vocabulary can be precisely deployed to establish the temporal position of a harvest poem. The windrow — the organized row of cut but not yet collected crop — occupies a specific moment in the haymaking or grain harvesting sequence (after cutting, before gathering into haycocks or stooks), and poems that reference windrows are therefore poems about the in-between time: the harvest organized but not yet secured, the work done but not yet complete. Students should trace the temporal implications of different harvest images: standing crop (before cutting), windrow (cut but drying), stook or haycock (organized but not stored), rick (stored but not processed), granary (processed and secured). Each stage implies a different relationship to risk, labor, and completion, and attentive readers can use these stages to map a poem's position in the agricultural and elegiac calendars. Students should note that windrow has survived into the vocabulary of mechanical haymaking — the modern rake creates windrows in exactly the same way as the hand rake — and is therefore one of the few traditional agricultural terms that has retained its technical meaning in contemporary farming practice. Related terms: stook, rick, sheave, gleaner, aftermath.
Other Meanings of “windrow”
Also Known As
swath swathe hay-row rake-row
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