The hills waiting to be plowed by the speaker represent the oppressive reality of work, the unending obligation to take care of business that every adult faces in Frost’s time and today. The hills symbolize the job never finished, the self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, self-justifying to-do list, and how such obligation becomes a torment.

It is not that the speaker is lazy or even delinquent in tending to his farm. But even as the speaker works diligently, he is but a single person manning a single hoe. And within the wider perspective, once he concludes this year’s hoeing, another year’s hoeing will await, and then another, and then another. The speaker knows he must work, that the pause here for a conversation will not lighten his burden at all. It is a zero-sum proposition: the same amount of work will be there after he takes a moment to engage this passing figure in a bit of conversation. When he thrusts his hoe, blade up, into the ground, it is a moment of defiance, the lonely soul asserting, even for a moment, his right to be free of the dreary burden and endless responsibilities of work if only for a moment’s chat.