Philip Larkin’s “The Mower”
"It's awful to have lost whatever talent one may have had," Philip Larkin ruefully observed in April 1978, almost a year before he wrote "The Mower."[1] His last collection of poems, High Windows, had appeared in 1974, and from then until his death in 1985 his poems were brief and few, with the exception of the famous "Aubade" which had been started years earlier. Reading through Larkin's posthumous Collected Poems (1988) one is indeed struck by the speed and the sadness of the decline of his last years, but Larkin's own judgment, typically serf-deprecating, is too harsh. What is fascinating about "The Mower," a poem which has received no critical attention, is that it exhibits most of Larkin's powers at their height but at the same time attests to his failure to sustain them.
The poem is quintessential Larkin: it bears his stamp and can be mistaken for no one else's. The title is so plainly apt that the reader moves on the first line without considering that the mower is at once the mowing machine by which the hedgehog is killed, and its operator, the speaker of the poem. Furthermore Larkin is probably thinking of Andrew Marvell's "Mower" poems where the speaker, Damon the Mower, pointedly prefers the fields, those uncorrupted natural gardens, to houses' artificial gardens in which unnatural hybrids are cultivated. By associating himself with Marvell's Damon, Larkin presents himself as sharing the Mower's preference, but only so that he can reproach himself all the more keenly for killing in a natural paradise and thus present himself as the Grim Reaper, a bringer of death to an innocent creature.[2]
Unlike Marvell's, Larkin's poem stems from a real incident and, thanks to Andrew Motion's biography and Anthony Thwaite's edition of Larkin's letters, we now know its particular details. Larkin's companion, Monica Jones, recalls that "when it happened, he came in from the garden howling. He was very upset. He'd been feeding the hedgehog, you see --he looked out for it in the mornings. He started writing about it soon afterwards,"[3] and after work that day (June 10, 1979) Larkin was writing to his close friend Judy Egerton that "This has been a rather depressing day: killed a hedgehog while mowing the lawn. By accident, of course. It's upset me rather."[4] In his earlier writing Larkin would have refined these details so that they would still sound personal to the reader and yet stand at a safe distance from the poet's most painful feelings. This poem's circumstances, on the contrary, are the poem. No one who has accidentally killed an animal can fail to recognize as genuine either the sequence of events or the speaker's self-lacerating wretchedness. True to the directness of the experience, the plain diction and syntax stave off the sentimentality which would devalue the speaker's anguish, while themselves achieving a pathos beyond the reach of such a heightened writing.
One has only to consider the poem's first sentence to appreciate that seeming artlessness which marks Larkin's very best verse:
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, Killed.[5]
Because the mower is of the kind that one has to push unaided (it is impossible to imagine habit-bound Larkin using an electric one), the hedgehog is killed by the blades without the distracting agency of electricity. By withholding news of its death ("killed") until the prominent position in the third line, Larkin allows the reader neutrally to experience with him the "stalling" of the mower, and to carry out with him the natural step of kneeling by the blades to find out what went wrong: lawnmowers frequently get jammed by stones, or tightly twisted grass. On a second reading, however, the opening phrase ("The mower stalled, twice") is grim. The comma after "stalled" brilliantly enacts the pause of the stalling and adds a sinister tone to "twice," which in turn is confirmed by the frozen violence of "jammed up." The everyday occurrence of having one's mower stall twice, now reveals itself as two strikes; perhaps the first on its own did not kill the hedgehog, but the second running-over has such force as to have the hedgehog "jammed up" (my emphasis) against the blades, rather than merely jammed.
Criticism, still less paraphrase, cannot do justice to the poem's two saddest lines: "It had been in the long grass," and "Next morning I got up and it did not." The former, the first sentence devoted entirely to the hedgehog, is uttered with desolate realization and explanation (certainly not excuse), while stressing through the use of the simplest verb, "had been," the fact of the hedgehog's inoffensive existing. Against this is clashed the brutality with which the speaker "mauls . . . unmendably" the hedgehog's "unobtrusive" world, "unobtrusive" both because the hedgehog was hidden in the long grass and because it obtruded on no one else's world. And after the statement that "burial was no help" ("was" rather than "would have been" makes clear that the speaker did indeed bury, the hedgehog) comes the line "Next morning I got up and it did not" which renews the poet's loss sharply by capturing so simply the difference between life and death.
<!--pagebreak-->If Larkin had allowed himself to end here, "The Mower" would have been a fragment allying itself with his other poems about death yet distanced from them in its presentation of a speaker who actually brings death rather than one who fearfully awaits it. Instead Larkin chose to add four moralizing lines urging carefulness and kindness. The latter seems long to have been an important virtue for him. In 1960, almost twenty years before "The Mower," he had ended "Talking in Bed" by musing on how difficult it is to find "Words at once true and kind, / Or not untrue and not unkind"[6]; a year later he was privately addressing a mistress as "Dear, kind Maeve" and as "a kindhearted companion"[7]; he had brought "To the Sea" (written in 1969) to a somewhat strident conclusion by commending seaside visitors for "helping the old, too, as they ought [my emphasis],"[sup8] and the next year, in "How," stressed "Our need for kindness now."[sup9] Personal doctrines, however, are not always harmoniously integrated into a writer's work, and only in "Talking in Bed" is kindness (significantly balanced by its opposite) in keeping with the whole poem.
The plea for kindness in "The Mower" is a
particularly grave weakening. To state that "the first day after a death, the
new absence/Is always the same" is to generalize away the bitterness of a grief
felt in isolation which the previous lines so uncompromisingly demonstrate,
while the heavy stress on mutual kindness and carefulness is at best a jarring
transition from the death of the hedgehog to which the speaker had been careful
and kind, but which he had killed by accident. After its memorable start the
poem has become a scaled-down carpe diem, with the concluding injunction feeble
after the instance giving rise to it. In his best years, those in which he wrote
The Less Deceived and The Whitsun Weddings, Larkin would have been
moved to explore the complexity of "the new absence" by allowing his musings and
questioning to glide into generalized precisions rather than, as he does in "The
Mower," wrenching the poem past its most interesting possibility: The weariness
of the final lines of "The Mower" is not just that felt by a speaker nearing his
own death; it is the weariness of a poet who realizes that his powers are
sharply falling off. "The Mower" stands as an intriguing failure.
NOTES
[1] Andrew Motion, Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life. (London: Faber and Faber, 1993) 470.
[2] Literary allusiveness in titles is a familiar trait in Larkin: "I Remember, I Remember" alludes to Hood, "Dockery and Son" to Dickens, "Sad Steps" to Sidney, and "This Be The Verse" to Stevenson.
[3] Motion 475.
[4] Philip Larkin, Selected Letters of Philip Larkin. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) 601.
[5] Philip Larkin, Collected Poems. Ed. Anthony Thwaite. (London: Faber and Faber; 1992) 214.
[6] Collected Poems 129.
[sup7] Motion 307.
[8] Collected Poems 174.
[9] Collected Poems 176.
