Life, Death and Mowing

Summary

“Lawnmower poetry had its highpoint in the late 20th century but now would be a good moment for a revival,” says the study’s author, Francesca Gardner, from Cambridge’s English Faculty and St Catharine’s College. “It might seem random to write poetry about mowing but it’s a great vehicle for exploring our relationship with nature and with each other. Andrew Marvell wrote about mowing with scythes after the English Civil War and modern poets continue to use lawnmowers to think about their own ups and downs. “In a time of eco-crisis, conflict and societal problems, perhaps another poet will be inspired to write one soon. They might reflect the growing anti-lawn movement or something else entirely.” In 1651, Andrew Marvell wrote a poem in which a mower accidentally kills a bird crouched in the grass. In ‘Upon Appleton House’, he wrote that the ‘Edge’ of the scythe was left ‘all bloody from its Breast’. Gardner argues that the poem makes us think about ‘the Flesh untimely mow’d’ as a result of powerful undeviating cycles including the seasons and warfare which dominate our lives and determine our actions. In 1979, another poet from Hull, Philip Larkin, described killing a hedgehog with his own motorised machine. In The Mower, Larkin wrote that his mower had 'stalled, twice' and that he found 'A hedgehog jammed up against the blades, / Killed.’ Inspired by ‘Upon Appleton House’, Larkin also admired Marvell’s four mower poems, ‘The Mower’s Song’, ‘Damon the Mower’, ‘The Mower Against Gardens’, and ‘The Mower to the Glow-Worms’, describing them as ‘charming and exquisite in the pastoral tradition’, and Gardner points out numerous similarities between the two poets. “Larkin had a deep awareness of pastoral and georgic poetry and this makes his poem more unsettling. While he felt terrible about killing the hedgehog, which really happened, his poem is disturbing because it presents an uneasy affinity between the natural and the mechanical.” “Every time Larkin cuts the grass, ...