The narrator starts the poem describing the long night of driving that a farmer had in order to deliver the hay. He "pulled in at eight a.m." The narrator then directs the attention to their actions and somebody else's, apparently both farmers:
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
Then the speaker continues describing a scene at lunchtime, where, under a Black oak, in the heat of the day, the man who delivers the hay says the meaningful and final sentences of the work:
“I’m sixty-eight”
“I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that’s just what
I’ve gone and done.”
From this short view of the poem, there are several themes that the reader can take out of the poem. Two of the are the following:
"Life happens too fast, sometimes without even notice" The poem leads you thinking on how time flies, in one second you are seventeen, saying that you would hate delivering hay your whole life, and the next second, you are sixty-eight, finding out that you have spent your whole life doing exactly something you said you would not.
"People do not always get the jobs they want" or similarly, "People do not always make their living out of something they like".
Certainly, the farmer did not want to buck and deliver hay his whole life. However, whatever the circumstances might have been, he ended up at his 60s with a work he did not want to.
