Two Poets Went to Mow

 In these parts, where every house is surrounded by a sea of lawn, mowing is something between a religious observance and a civic duty – indeed, there are byelaws in force that limit the length to which grass is allowed to grow. At weekends especially, the air is loud with the roar of ride-on mowers, describing ever-diminishing squares until all is level and mown. Philip Larkin, with his love-hate relationship with his Qualcast mower, would have had plenty to grumble about here. His mowing activities famously gifted him two fine late poems: the perfect 'Cut Grass' –

Cut grass lies frail:
Short is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

They die in the white hours
Of young-leafed June 
With chestnut flowers,
With hedgerows snow-like strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace. 

And 'The Mower', with its to me unsatisfactorily glib ending – 

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

'The Mower' (as Larkin surely knew) echoes a stanza in 'Upon Appleton House' by Hull's other great poet, Andrew Marvell, describing mowers at work – 

With whistling Sithe, and Elbow strong,
These Massacre the Grass along:
While one, unknowing, carves the Rail,
Whose yet unfeather'd Quils her fail.
The Edge all bloody from its Breast
He draws, and does his stroke detest;
Fearing the Flesh untimely mow'd
To him a Fate as black forebode.

Marvell was as strangely obsessed with mowing as Larkin, and wrote four poems in which the mysterious figure of The Mower writes of his troubled relationship with one Juliana – and, in one the poems, inveighs against gardens: 

The Mower Against Gardens

Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use,

Did after him the world seduce,

And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,

Where nature was most plain and pure.

He first enclosed within the gardens square

A dead and standing pool of air,

And a more luscious earth for them did knead,

Which stupefied them while it fed.

The pink grew then as double as his mind;

The nutriment did change the kind.

With strange perfumes he did the roses taint,

And flowers themselves were taught to paint.

The tulip, white, did for complexion seek,

And learned to interline its cheek:

Its onion root they then so high did hold,

That one was for a meadow sold.

Another world was searched, through oceans new,

To find the Marvel of Peru.

And yet these rarities might be allowed

To man, that sovereign thing and proud,

Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,

Forbidden mixtures there to see.

No plant now knew the stock from which it came;

He grafts upon the wild the tame:

That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit

Might put the palate in dispute.

His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,

Lest any tyrant him outdo.

And in the cherry he does nature vex,

To procreate without a sex.

’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,

While the sweet fields do lie forgot:

Where willing nature does to all dispense

A wild and fragrant innocence:

And fauns and fairies do the meadows till,

More by their presence than their skill.

Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,

May to adorn the gardens stand:

But howsoe’er the figures do excel,

The gods themselves with us do dwell.

Round here a fine abundance of wild flowers – bird vetch, lupins, bird's-foot trefoil, yarrow, clovers, wild thyme, dog daisies, bedstraw, loosestrife, pink bindweed, self-heal and more  – thrive where the mower doesn't go. Marvell's Mower had a point.