All being well, this should be our last week of remote learning. For my own last Poem of the Day, then, let me give you the saddest, wisest poem I know: The Mower by Philip Larkin.
The poem’s ‘inciting incident’ is not obviously poetical. Mowing the lawn one day, Larkin unwittingly runs over and kills a hedgehog. Not obviously poetical, perhaps, but Larkin may be evoking Robert Burns’ famous lament, To a Mouse, in which he pitied a poor field mouse whose nest was ruined by the plough’s cruel blade: ‘The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, / Gang aft agley, / An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain / For promis’d joy!’ Larkin’s grisly accident provokes him, like Burns, to reflect – profoundly – on grief, guilt and how we should treat each other, ‘while there is still time.’
Somehow the poem manages, in a few plain words, to show (or seem to show) everything worth showing of life, death and our relationship with the ‘unobtrusive world’ of nature: how we cultivate it, care for it, and carelessly destroy it.
A few plain words – but how beautifully precise they are, and how precisely placed! How much pain, for instance, does ‘Unmendably’ convey, thanks in part to its delayed position. And how much meaning is packed into ‘careful’ and the pause created by the stanza break immediately after it…Yes, we should take care – be cautious of, and full of care for, our world, ourselves, each other. We should – but let’s face it, we often fail; we’re so often careless. Note, too, how the poem ends somewhat abruptly, its final line and final stanza shorter than expected. As if precious time runs out on the poet.
I would say that Larkin’s moving plea for mutual care and kindness makes The Mower a perfect poem for this year; but really it’s perfect for all years.
The Mower
By Philip Larkin
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.
