The most recent online class I'm participating in is Poetry in America: Modernism. People have been sharing there reactions to Frost's poem The Pasture, many of them seeming not to appreciate the beauty of clearing out a spring. My comment in the group:

I find it interesting, and perhaps a little sad, reading what others have written about the poem, and especially about the chores that Frost had to do. I grew up not far from Robert Frost’s stone house and as a kid often visited his grave. I walked on leaves no step had trodden black, and cleared dead leaves from pasture springs. It was some of the happiest days of my childhood. I savored that time.

The chores were not an uninteresting tedium to be endured, they were moments of blessed solitude and contemplation. I would prefer to do them myself, but if a close friend was around, I would invite them to this special place, you come too.

I would stay, as long as I reasonably could, to watch the water clear. Generally, I read most of Frost’s poems quite literally. I know the beauty of water clearing in a spring. Yet there is some important clearing that goes on, as you watch a spring clear, and that is your mind clearing.