Sinclair Ross' "Field of Wheat" Is a

Sinclair Ross' "Field of Wheat" is a poignant testament to human endurance as well as the frailty individuals sometimes must admit in the face of fickle nature. Each season, in its turn brings new concerns for a farmer. An unseasonably warm winter might cause early sewn seeds to sprout and then freeze. Spring might come to late for the fruits of the grain to mature by harvest. Fall might bring to much rain and wash out the strong shoots or blight them with disease.

Summer, the season that seems it would be the sweetest, can bring to hot a sun or as in this case a fast moving summer storm that brings the earth to renewal before human intervention can reach its goal. Ross paints a universal picture of the strain of the weather on agriculture. These are still the factors that can make or break a crop, a year or even a family.

The point-of-view of the burned-out farm wife wavering between desperation and endurance seals the imagery of the story into apposition of the hope of every crops inherent gamble, born on the back of her husband, John. Martha has seen and recognizes the gamble. She can name, not so lightly, the calamity that has been the end of so many crops, and this crop is the best one ever.

Martha makes a mental list of how deserved her John is for this success as she ticks of the list, "A crop like this was coming to him. He had had his share of failures and set-backs, if ever a man had, twenty times over...Wasting and unending it was as struggle, struggle against wind and insects, drought and weeds.

Not an heroic struggle to give a man courage and resolve, but a frantic, unavailing one." Martha views her husband in her minds eye as she looks out over the field and sees his wake of dust, "hunched black and sweaty on the harrow-cart, twelve hours a day, smothering in dust, shoulders sagged wearily beneath the glare of sun." She is keenly aware that his hope is not for himself and by default not for the generation for which she belongs, but for their children.

So their success might not be tied to the strength of their backs. Sacrifices made and gambles embraced so they might not have to grow without knowledge of anything that will bring them more success than farming. "It was the children now, Joe and Annabelle: this winter perhaps they could send them to school in town and let them take music lessons." Personal jealousies aside Martha's hopes for this beautiful crop was to set the children free to learn a better way to live.

"That was why he breasted the sun and dust a frantic, dogged fool, to spare them, to help them to a life that offered more than seat and debts." Summer brought these dreams to a close with a spiteful summer hailstorm. In the face of this fury, enough to break all the panes in the windows, it is hard to recognize the villain. Martha bitter about her own advice for hail insurance not being heeded and failing to have a voice toward the weather, so clearly arbitrary.

"The wheat, the acres and acres of it, green and tall, if only he had put some insurance on it. Damned mule -- just work and work. No head himself and to stubborn to listen to anyone else." Martha laments the loss and at the same time dreads the bleak future. Their will be no school in town for the children, none of the, "creams and things other women had..." In the face of the.