Lawnmower Poetry and the Poetry of Lawnmowers

‘The lawnmower is not the sexiest of subjects’, asserts Brian Radam in Lawnmowers: An Illustrated History.1 This is both an apology and the start of an apology, as his study takes us through the lawnmower's invention, its meteoric rise in popularity (the industry is now worth around 50 billion dollars annually in the UK, USA and Europe alone), its many types (from the camel-drawn to the voice-activated) and the mechanical principles for cutting grass (cylinder, rotary, reciprocating knife and flail).2 In the same vein, the microgenre of lawnmower poetry is captivated by the lawnmower's capacity both to bore and to endlessly suggest, often simultaneously. It modifies genres such as the pastoral and the georgic; tackles themes such as violence, childhood, mortality, masculinity and the ‘quotidian’; juggles classical and biblical contexts; and negotiates binaries such as man and machine, nature and machine, the country and the city (or, more specifically and ambiguously, the country and the suburb), agency and determinism, destruction and preservation, and conflict and harmony. This article will explore a representatively diverse sample of lawnmower poetry through the lens of technography, a theoretical approach clustered around the Open Humanities Press series edited by Steven Connor, David Trotter and James Purdon. The series explores ‘the cultural (written) history of material technologies’, arguing that technology's origins in the Greek philosophical concept of techne (τέχνη, making/art/craft) and its common contemporary usage (a machine, system or piece of kit) are still very much intertwined.3 It also stresses that, naturalised as it has become, writing is itself a technology, in being a mediating system which we ourselves have invented—and the converse is true: ‘all machines are also media’, in that they ‘come between their users or originators and those users’ purposes, as well as providing substitute ways to achieve those purposes’.4 As James Purdon states, ‘[t]echnography does not presuppose where, if anywhere, text begins, and the machine stops’.5 A text, then, might not just be concerned with technology in terms of its content (i.e. a poem is about a machine) but through its form (i.e. a poem functions like the machine that it is about). As summarised by Pryor and Trotter, technographies ‘attend equally to the rhetoric sedimented in machines, to machines behaving rhetorically, to rhetoric that behaves mechanically, and to rhetoric behaving in pointed opposition to mechanism’.6 Previous topics of research have ranged from ticker tape to slot machines; this article puts lawnmowers on the technographic map, offering a further focussed study of a particular machine.7 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.8 Larkin toys with Marvellian tradition in ‘The Mower’ most obviously in the figure of the mower becoming a lawnmower, his scythe its blades. The ‘long grass’ recalls Isaiah 40:6, ‘All flesh is grass’: compare ‘Damon the Mower’ (‘'Tis Death alone that this must do/For Death thou art a Mower too’), or ‘The Mower to the Glow Worms’ (‘Shining unto no higher end/Than to presage the grass's fall’, 3–4).11 And Marvell's unspoiled Eden perverted by extravagant early modern hybridising, grafting and dividing is ironised in Larkin's dull, respectable suburban lawn (c.f. ‘The Mower against Gardens’: ‘He first enclosed within the gardens square/A dead and standing pool of air’; ‘No plant now knew the stock from which it came;/He grafts upon the wild the tame’, 5–6; 23–24). At first glance, ‘The Mower’ seems to be a commentary on the twin poisons of increasing mechanisation and urbanisation, whereby the late 20th-century lawnmower is disruptor of the natural and harmonious cycles of life, of harvests and lifespans passing by each in their proper place and at their proper time. Accordingly, in an early handwritten manuscript, Larkin changes ‘among’ the blades to ‘against’ the blades, the deixis more firmly stressing the yielding of the organic and animate to the inanimate nature of machinery, while ‘killed’ also replaces the less implicative and implicating ‘dead’.12 But Larkin's deeper awareness of the pastoral and the georgic, genres which have always thrived on the ambiguous boundaries between the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’, render his poetry more unsettling than this; the poem actually discovers an uneasy affinity between the natural and the mechanical. No scene that turns with engines strange Does oft'ner then these meadows change […] With whistling scythe, and elbow strong, These massacre the grass along: While one, unknowing, carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills 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. (385–400) ‘Upon Appleton House’ has been described as variously, and sometimes both, pastoral and georgic; the borders of the two genres are permeable, and this article agrees with Terry Gifford that ‘there is a need for a new framing of the pastoral-georgic tradition that recognises texts that complicate any simple polarisation of idealisation and responsibility, the aesthetic and the practical, repose and labour, otium and negotium’.15 This passage is a presentation of mowing as inflected by georgic as it is by pastoral; here the task is perhaps closer to negotium and labor than the more idealised and pastoral occupations under the umbrella of otium, such as shepherding. Indeed, while scythes are symbolically instrumental to the amorous and elegiac subgenres of pastoral in Marvell's mower poems, they are also tools with a practical, agricultural purpose. Accordingly, in the first georgic when discussing the harvest Virgil stresses that their use should be coupled with respect, forethought and intentionality—‘neque ante/falcem maturis quisquam supponat aristis,/quam Cereri torta redimitus tempora quercu/det motus incompositos et carmina dicat’ (‘nor let any put his sickle to the ripe corn, ere for Ceres he crown his brows with oaken wreath, dance artless measures, and chant her hymns’).16 Sympathy for injured or dying animals, often as a result of hunting or overwork, is also a georgic trope; as Richard F. Thomas briefly points out about ‘Upon Appleton House’ specifically, ‘the apostrophe and sympathy’ which follows this episode (‘Unhappy birds! what does it boot/To build below the grass’s root’) is redolent of ‘Virgil's empathetic view of the dying plough ox’ in the third book of the Georgics (409–10).17 Killing an animal in grass with a blade or blades, forgoing kindness in the unthinking completion of a task: the similarities between Marvell and Larkin's poems are striking. What is disturbing in ‘The Mower’, then, is not the idea that nature is vulnerable to technological disruption, it is the idea there is something mechanical and deterministic about nature itself in working order, and that we work mechanically and deterministically within this working system. It is not the purposiveness of hunting or the necessity of toil which is foregrounded, as is typical of georgic, but instead that the death of the animal is collateral damage. This view of nature and our place within it might be considered georgic, in that it is unforgiving, self-evidently complex and sometimes violent, driven by change and seasonal cycles (‘No scene that turns with engines strange/Does oft'ner then these meadows change’), and presented as already mediated and requiring mediation.18 But it is also not unpastoral, especially in the harmonious (and as a result potentially uncanny) coupling of human and natural actions: as in, for instance, Alexander Pope's ‘Spring’, in which the flowers bloom in affinity with the shepherds competing alternately in a singing contest: ‘Then sing by turns, by turns the Muses sing,/Now hawthorns blossom, now the daisies spring’.19 Marvell's mower kills the rail accidentally but unthinkingly with his sharp and systematically operated scythe; in Larkin's poem the hedgehog's death is also caused by the lawnmower's efficiency. The mower is a labour-saving device, and labour-saving devices enable us to keep up with processes which will not stop for us. If the grass did not grow back every time he cut it, Larkin would not have to use a machine to complete the job quickly, efficiently and repeatedly, sacrificing attentiveness. In reacting and submitting to, and therefore mirroring, forces greater and crueller than us, in other words, we commit our own great acts of cruelty. A certain amount of numbing pleasure emerges in the space for contemplation created by labour saved when using a machine, which, as Connor states, upon piece of work […] of While space for it a whereby the space up is back the What this for Larkin is the hedgehog's up against the blades of the machine, that it on in his that when stop working for us, they and we have to their that the of is less about than particular As has pointed specifically with in and between for us is their and the when an or our from the as in a certain […] itself in such but to to the of something with which is to of the of we when we put it back As states, and but have now it is equally as to that a is at any This not be more in the of Larkin's lawnmower, seen in a upon with the of the space not to in pleasure through the work of by back but a higher kind of work the deterministic an of the agency which Larkin had the this a dividing between Larkin as and lawnmower as more Larkin also he has and will mechanically of the in mechanical The lawnmower has and will as and machines often as a form of or the of also when they are when we a or As Larkin with the lawnmower, his a to the that is the ‘the after the of the lawnmower, and not Larkin mowing the with the of the at the of the of the an from the is there an of as Larkin each of us the that the hedgehog's has I like mower the a as as we out in a in which the is injured while a lawnmower, to the same as Larkin's poem but instead in this not pleasure than he has had it is all on what the to its about human this to is the lawnmower and in the grass by in their the that like the of his the of georgic the otium of the pastoral As I to the its jammed the I the all in a The mower to but the and the of is by each system the of the of Larkin's poems might be described as as which us of our own ‘The us to the kindness of in this through from ‘Upon Appleton there is a in ‘The Mower’ between the of and the cycles of nature and of whereby the from the is through the This the of ‘The Mower’, to The to a when with Larkin's should be there is still If ‘The Mower’ functions like a an with the capacity to us a of awareness about our own it is worth in through the time of ‘The Mower’ and it the to be and to be It is that the poem stresses the of this it this to of the of the lawnmower from us (and after it The we in the the poem then seems to more with I had in to had been and had seen but we are to the and to ‘The first day after a briefly to us we the it is not the is an in but the always the us to the simple to we are to the here and The the and the with a should be careful of each should be the is also by In this what time have we What for the that it in the poem in the first But it is this of the poem in the the of its as it and to up the of which this very This is of many of Larkin's poems, often concerned with or their or two kind of of form or a of in the the at the of and for or the of or the of and Larkin's with or machines, from the lawnmower to the in seems to be and perhaps to this in his and of there of […] I in in the of dead In Marvell's mower figure to the the of their to the The is a on the first of the with man and his lawnmower are with the as and as the the lawn of his in in from the of to the that he is in and grass the the task of with his equally to the of the the The of is with the and are like ‘the and they are like the man mowing the lawn the In both these lawnmower are unthinking the what the types around him man mowing the lawn the from the the now with in their their and and their and and an in dead it I this it out but from about this from is the deixis of worth to, as the the to the not as a further and are blades are the these that the of which is a kind of the man is in the the but in a deeper an of at about the at as work on the when writing poetry about then the for are in to for this the his of is at which of the but we the as the to an through poetry which will not be in all the and in the of suburban and […] we to much as we did in the a all for suburban and from the lawn to the with their on and and this man mowing the lawn the from is that all grass is that all of the I all the to to to the I the their in the morning and at and at and especially at especially at in a to the by the to It would be a to up and have to the I I might in the of which for the and the I to much be to that if I the they they have all of from all the through to a by the I that very much like where, as it I in a many after a in Now I If I was the have a of a on and in just that in an to the have if I was actually a to the lawnmower what would he to the does the to actually around on this does not that he will to the it something and two for the The poem the I It two the of the and a of The of is of the be like of lawnmowers be like of which is of lawnmowers is of which that are with ‘the or of from the from and then that But which should the the us from our about what it to have a […] the for than […] a to of and […] than a of might a space of both and the poem with or I I I from a lawnmower poem is of which the and as the a mower ‘the pool and are they ‘the of they is in typical a ‘the of a or by or other as well as technology the we are to in the poem the of the of by is the and it is by the through the of the of the lawnmower's and the as (i.e. whereby of is a by a series of To to the back to as it to on and the to and the common of As about of be a of or of to what for as well as what to be to this This the other an with lawnmowers and all they for the the the mechanical and the very of the in et have him a then will have him from all his and him to his This of back such the of the world and the in the the of life, and it to a in this the are which in form but the that they and the work that they will in their and Indeed, the of the book on lawnmowers was the ‘The Mower’ the lawnmower as the of an for his in to and to the of the be in the to on they not I from his and of and the that he is to be between and I him He be or or or and us we of him is that he for the of the space by his must him in A for the 20th-century lawnmower a the like on the his mowing it is time a The episode of two of The is an of out around the of It the between and with mowing his lawn to be as a and in his view by and after he is for a He is to and further after his out at the their up being and in their and a and place of has to the lawn in his when and they are and the the between their both must the on the of his own masculinity is like a in a are his and of the masculinity of for in mowing the lawn in the the with the rhetoric of of his even a task is in a more the as often between and is and by but this itself a of and which it is to or with for the as if itself not to the of but to it to a of suburban Indeed, I the that be this to a machine has to the he the A might a of the of machine and or what was in was might deeper the of the of or in of or need might be his for an his to a for a of Mower has in has the With in the but no yet I in from mowing of lawn and in the to around at and the those and I had to What I instead was in the between the out from its in the always did that was the As also back now in the just the first of and the of the with on and for the and and for life, but cutting through then for The first was the the had seen an […] The first was the he the the the The his to plant for all […] But the first the and from when the to The was just as […] the is the first And the first is the And when from Eden we our The morning after is the first the of the and in the of the every often on the while he the grass This is the man up in the the on his that he through our our new the the blades stop at once. keep as It must be the the of the of are by the form of ‘The this is in opposition to through the of the by the and of the and the of the typical of a by one, the poem is a kind of (and a pastoral which the of the of the as in The from the and of his is in to the of the it is a which the has no to And the of the the poem and yet we are to the the but even ‘the in the does not the figure as the the article an of This also to the poem a of if form is and theoretical and then the on the and of labour is in of the and of pastoral the of typical of pastoral the as if in a to of is in the an by the not or but (the is with the that he is still of blades stop at In this the has in his as up the of the by their He and these in from the as from the It that this being will as long as they and the of grass life, are long as they their place and keep But they must be in their natural to to the I that there be […] I a lawn is I to put up with daisies and in […] But there are put the I will not and the and other to have their […] The of and let is to is is the in the human […] The is the of human […] the the back a of […] The to the by It between the that was was and its was It on the lawn for the most of the And it and It had a and a And this is the that the the of ‘The of the the is as are that was with as a which to ‘the complete of a human being the or of a The is a in but is the of was the lawnmower is as it has an the be are also not and and any or with the lawnmower must be we are that it a which to human or machine, for the in the to be of human more and The of the cutting blades that the lawnmower in poem would have been a mower with no or the first for the machine was in while lawnmowers first in in In a kind of the two of the which the lawnmower a human and the capacity to had a and a it, like of an which but also human its something of a poem also with a of the is the the for are to be other lawnmowers lawnmower that was like its its a kind of which the human as it at the upon an of […] that the The that the poem is mediated by the of a and human a or with the strange and to it with than But the lawnmower the and in its from the a certain and of The it is and the it is And in the when I I The with The and the and the To on With The it is and the it is But all of the are to And all of the are The and they they on their when I have by With The it is and the it is But will like it, the is in the cut for her and for And for labor With The it is and the it is And the is He a on his is and a But of it all I must to work With A with this a as for that and A of a of Is all for job for many I caused many […] But new the scene And a has now that time are I the The by the of with our pastoral is a and at is on pastoral after other research the and work has or is in The in and and is a of on ‘The of a at in