Poem of the week: The Mower’s Song by Andrew Marvell

The Mower’s Song

My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its hopes as in a glass;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

But these, while I with sorrow pine,
Grew more luxuriant still and fine,
That not one blade of grass you spy’d
But had a flower on either side;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

Unthankful meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forgo?
And in your gaudy May-games meet
While I lay trodden under feet?
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

But what you in compassion ought,
Shall now by my revenge be wrought;
And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all,
Will in one common ruin fall.
For Juliana comes, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

And thus, ye meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my tomb;
For Juliana comes, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.

The Mower’s Song is one of four “Mower” poems by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), complementing his most substantial work in the country house genre, Upon Appleton House. All date from the period he spent at Nun Appleton House (1651-2) as tutor to Mary, the daughter of Lord General Thomas Fairfax.

The English civil war and the impending first Anglo-Dutch war enrich Marvell’s view of Arcadia. Lord Fairfax had laid out the gardens at Appleton “in the Figure of a Fort”. Upon Appleton House develops a brilliantly extended metaphor of the horticultural battleground, producing one of the most unusual and moving anti-war meditations of any age.

Images of wounding, physical and psychological, recur in the Mower quartet. Perhaps Damon the Mower provides the most relevant and helpful context here. Damon, in love with Juliana (whose name is associated with July and thus the high summer heat of Damon’s desires) suffers not only the flames of love but accidentally wounds himself in the ankle with his own scythe. The theme of being “mown down” by love might suggest satire (for which Marvell certainly had no little talent) but its treatment is scarcely light-hearted, any more than the Mower is simply a figure of rustic innocence. The Mower imposes his will on nature like the more sophisticated, commercially motivated horticulturalist excoriated in The Mower Against Gardens. Intrinsic to banishment from Eden, the war between nature and unnaturally greedy humanity further infects the vision of the garden as redemptive pastoral.

Lost clarity of understanding is proclaimed by the Mower in the first verse of his song, where the noun “survey” suggests a once informed, rational perception of the landscape. His hopes have similarly been decimated.

The meadows are the subject of the second stanza, flourishing with new spring grass and a proliferation of wild flowers. Envious of the “gaudy May-games” the singer turns on these “unthankful meadows”, addressing them directly in stanza three. He goes on to declare that he will vengefully enforce the meadows’ withheld “compassion” (they should have wilted in sympathy with the lover) and ensure that “flow’rs, and grass, and I and all, / Will in one common ruin fall.”

Marvell’s refrain suggests, perhaps, a rustic style of diction. The grammatical jolt between the two lines, “For Juliana comes, and she / What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me”, brings the violence of the scythe into the syntax, and turns the poem away from any potential comedy. Juliana’s verb, “came”, changes tense as the poem continues, while the narrative remains in the present continuous. When “came” shifts to “comes” in the last two stanzas, we can imagine the mower’s grass-like trembling at the approach of footsteps. In the final line of the refrain’s couplet, the two half-lines seem to swing like a scythe, the separating comma suggesting the pause between one keen stroke and another.

Lightest of the Mower poems, The Mower’s Song still leaves us in no doubt about the speaker’s sense of devastation, and that these represent the general state of the fallen human world and its relationships. For a detailed examination of the Mower poems and their relation to Marvell’s other work, this thesis is well worth a look.