Sonnet #5: Mower's Song
 

Mower’s Song

The boy who mows my yard
thinks that he once was I.
He pushes pretty hard
under the prairie sky.
He has no belching motor
or right-hand discharge chute,
no madly whirring rotor,
and he’s no longer cute.

Just a front-mounted reel
geared to a rubber wheel,
and that is how the grass
made on the Lord’s Third Day
will fall as fragrant hay
until I too shall pass.

CATHY CHANDLER'S COMMENT: What a treat! A sonnet in trimeter. Cuts to the chase (no pun intended ;-)) On each new reading I’ve found more to love about it, even line 8, which I thought a trifle rhyme-driven at first, but which I soon realized is simply natural, good-natured banter. The details in the juxtaposition of the newfangled versus the old-style mowing machine and the acceptance of the aging process in lines 11 through 14 are brilliant. One thinks of mowing as reaping or harvesting. Or shades of the “grim reaper”. Or, better still, Psalm 37:2-3. No nits.

COMMENT BY GAIL: My favorite part of this is the last 4 lines, where the living grass (created by God and therefore sanctified) turns into dead grass, "which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven." Since all flesh is grass, as the Bible loves to remind us,
the best we can hope for is to leave the memory of "fragrant hay."

Mower's Song
 

This is NOT a sonnet. Sonnets MUST be written in iambic pentameter verse. All other fourteen-line forms are called "quatorzains."

While I may not be as proscriptive as Mr. Turco above, I can't deny feeling very frustrated at the lack of standard sonnets selected so far. The whole point of "form" is to maximize one's creative ability within certain confines, isn't it?

In any event, it couldn't be more obvious who wrote this one, and whether it's a sonnet or not, it's a delightful, if very ephemeral, poem. The only real drawback is that it doesn't particularly invite comment. It says its piece, and that's all there is to it. It's well executed, has logical substitutions, and feels as natural as its subject matter.

Having said that, I wonder how much name recognition led to this poem being selected. It's a quality piece, to be sure, but certainly not overly insightful or compelling.

Lew expresses his own entirely defensible view of things, but others might defensibly differ. In an Erato thread on the subject, Alicia Stallings said "testing the rules of the sonnet is almost part of the tradition of the sonnet in English (otherwise we'd only have Petrarchan sonnets for one)--and there is practically a whole separate genre of nonce-rimed sonnets, and plenty of sonnets in other meters." And Dick Davis said "I agree wholly with AEStallings - there is a norm and there are variations from the norm."

"Mower's Song" is a sonnet. And so is Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet" as well as a sequence in James Merrill's "The Broken Home". I could list others as well. I would refer readers to The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet for more insights into the sonnet, its variations, and its continually evolving nature.

solitary reaper
 

This poem opens with an interesting premise: the narrator looking at his aging exterior self from the perspective of his still boyish interior self, sort of like Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper" told from the girl's point of view. Then it ditches that for the very pat symbolism of his having exchanged the new-fangled for the old-fashioned (although, I have to say, he's probably courting a heart attack with that "prairie" lawn of his). And I find the sextet heavy handed. I like the symbol of the Lord's grass, although having to mow the lawn every week makes the "third day" a bit banal.

Lewis Turco's point is well-taken, if stricter than my own thoughts. If this had been expanded to pentameter, there would have been more room for exploration. It might also have been made a satire, a Solitary Reaper of the Suburbs. As it stands, I find it a bit precious.

Finally, should the "I" in L2 be "me"?

Not if you want to be grammatical (and rhyme as well).

Stephen, Line 2 is grammatically correct ;).

I liked this when it was workshopped not long ago, and like it still. A well-carved cameo amulet, well-matched by Cathy's comment.

Sure, different sources will list different standards for what constitutes a sonnet...and there has to be the expectation of evolution in any form. The sonnet has been around for 700 years or so, after all. Nevertheless, with the exception of rhyme scheme, the form remained largely the same for 600 of those 700 years, then faced numerous mutations throughout the 20th Century. So I guess the real question is this: in a sonnet "competition," is more deference given to sonnets that adhere to the older standard, or to sonnets that are far less tethered to the traditional definition?

This is probably a discussion better suited for a non-poem thread, but it's likely a discussion worth having either way.

A fine poem. Visual. Touches of wistfulness, humor, and acceptance. The mower is old, but everything fits together.

This has been discussed before. Whether or not "I" is correct, "me" in this context would be an example of the "disjunctive pronoun", which these days is considered to be grammatically correct. It would also be a more natural form of speech. Who would say, for instance, "It was she" rather than "it was her", or "I thought I was he" instead of "I thought I was him"?

Brian, To answer your question: I would, for one. ;)

Thanks, especially for the phrase "disjunctive pronoun." Wikipedia has a good entry on it and the controversy which backs us up. That said, "I" is old-fashioned linguistically, so it does fit the poem.

Blimey, Catherine, and there was I thinking that I'm a bit of a pedant!

I thought it was very fine when I saw it on the board a few weeks ago, and I still think so. It's true there isn't a need to say much--the sonnet says it all.

And no, I'm not at all sure I believe that the "point of form" is "to maximize one's creative ability within certain confines." I hope no one who sits down to write a sonnet says, "Okay, here's my prison. Time to make the most of it / maximize my creative ability!"

C

I truly believe that the fourteener is the greatest stanza in literature. And I don't care if you write in pentameter, tetrameter, trimeter, or dimeter, or some heterometrical combination of them all. And frankly, I am less interested in Petrarchan or Shakespearean sonnets, than I am in nonce sonnets. As Professor Pound told us, "Make it new."

What?
 

Oh please! Haven't we been "treated" to enough Poetry Lite under the guise of sonnet? Yawn. I'm out of here.

I'm with Don Paterson on the advantages of writing in form: I also find that [the] subconscious can operate a lot more freely if I throw the left side of my brain some indigestible intellectual doggy-chew to shut it up and prevent it from interrupting.

That's a fantastic quote. Sums up my view to a T.

For what it's worth, when I sit down to write, I generally DO think about how whatever ideas I have are going to fit in the form. Putting urge and inspiration aside, I find writing a formal poem roughly akin to solving a crossword puzzle: there are many words one CAN put in the various places, but there's generally just one "right" word per place.

Getting my feet wet again on this list, with much trepidation. But I want to say that I have no problem at all with a 14-line sonnet in rhymed trimeter, just so long as it carries the full payload of exactly 14 lines. I much like "Mowers Song" in its entirety, in fact-- especially its wonderfully satisfying close, which somehow reminds me of "Fire and Ice".

However, did anyone else have trouble wrapping his/her head around "The boy who mows my yard / thinks that he once was I"? What am I missing? Isn't it the other way around? Or am I being terminally obtuse? (Don't answer that.)

For what this poem is, it's good enough. But to call it a sonnet so stretches the meaning of the word as to invite revocation of fhe proverbial poetic license. What the poem lacks is the grandeur and even sometimes the gravitas of iambic pentameter. There's nothing wrong with a jackdaw qua jackdaw, but a jackdaw ain't an eagle.

Marilyn, I'm with you on the reversal.

Ralph

I don't disagree with Don Paterson; I feel like Yeats said something similar, or at least I was told so, once: "It gives my brain something to play with while I write down what I didn't know I knew." But "maximizing our creative abilities" is pretty banal language.

Marilyn, the very thing you point out (that reversal in L1-2) was brought up when this poem was on the boards not more than a few weeks ago. It was variously criticized and defended but the upshot is that it was not changed. Is it odd? Yes, a bit. Does that matter? I'm not sure.

C

Dear Mr. Wyatt: please cease and desist from using the term "sonnet" to describe your work. My sonnet has an octave and a sestet, whereas you turn the last two lines into a couplet. Also, you have 10 syllables in your line, whereas there should be 11. Sincerely, Petrarch.

Now, back to the 21st century. My brother worked on a cool scientific study once. He set up computer images morphing a cat into a dog over time. Some images had the eyes change first, others changed the ears or mouth first. Then volunteers for the study would watch the video and click a button when they thought the animal had changed. Turns out, there are certain visual cues that trigger people to see dog or cat (ears are a big one, for example).

A trimeter sonnet as defined in this thread has the "correct" number of lines and a valid sonnet-like rhyme scheme. On the other hand, it varies from standard IP in a big way. Here is a bit from Julie Stoner's post in the call for submissions:

"And whether the poet follows the standard recipes for rhyme and meter and placement of the volta, or rebels against them, the audience's familiarity with the sonnet tradition must somehow inform and improve our experience of the poem". Later, she says "No volta = no sonnet". This comment was then endorsed by Catherine Chandler. So you can reject the judge's views but it seems clear that in this venue, variations on the form will fly. Certainly, our familiarity with the tradition informs this discussion!

I don't agree that sonnets in IP necessarily carry more "gravitas". Trimeter can give a pithier reading, done right, while IP can easily sound glib. "Mower's Song" seems to straddle that line a bit. It's paced well, but I also find L2 confusing. Why does the boy (how old do we think he is, given he's "no longer cute"?) think that he once was N, who seems older? The boy is father to the man?

I don't personally like the start, but I do warm to the poem as it goes along, and the sestet in particular has a pleasing simple gusto.

Sonnet Form/Structure
 

14 lines. One stanza. Iambic pentameter. English or one of the Italian rhyme schemes. Have I been misinformed for decades? I think not. Now, Sidney used hexameter in "To Stella," it is true--but too much license taken works against the tasks inherent in sonnet structure. Ask Robert Frost. Uh oh. Too late for that. Sorry. Frost said, by the way, "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the nets down." Enough said.

No one is talking about free verse (though I've sometimes reflected how interesting it would be to watch fine tennis players dispense with the net -- surely it would be harder, not easier). Frost, though, did play around with the sonnet form. In "Design," for example, he used his a-rhyme in seven different lines, and one of them was a reused rhyme (white). “The sonnet is the strictest form I have behaved in, and only then by pretending it wasn't a sonnet,” Frost once said. And surely he played around with rhyme schemes in ways that were not considered "traditional" in poems that he nonetheless considered to be sonnets.

Roger, apparently we respectfully disagree about how to interpret Frost's quote on free verse. "Design," of course, is still in pentameter, although, yes, license is evident in rhyme scheme as well as a two-stanza format.

Well, Wyatt introduced the couplet and wrote in meter that would get him skewered on the met board, and Surrey broke the sonnet into quatrains. If Shakespeare could write a tetrameter sonnet, and Sidney could write in hexameter, and Spenser could make up his own rhyme scheme, when did traditionalism reign in the English sonnet?

The sonnet stops short at line 2 for me, and it takes the rest of the poem to recover. It’s a strange thing to say that the boy thought he was the narrator, and the thought is left hanging.

Love it
 

My favorite so far, skillful, unique and touching all at once. Kudos to the Mower man.

Mower's Song
 

The simplicity of this one is just right; it feels as if it arrived in a a single breath. The trimeter delights me, and I love the ending. 'I' is the correct pronoun and doesn't give me any trouble (as 'me' would have done).
Like others I especially like the ending.

Straight outta Minnesota. This is a fine poem, we all know who the poet is and why it'll work for in a collection of theirs. And would people just shut up about the sonnet form, God, it's exhausting - it's what ever the poet wants it to be - open up your corsets and coffins.

J

Sweet little song, suitable for singing while mowing grass. I agree with critics who can't parse L1 and L2. (If you're allowed to substitute words for identical things and make the other necessary grammatical changes, I guess it's equivalent to "I think that I once was the boy who mows my lawn." But everybody knows you can't do that within the scope of "thinks". Lois thinks Superman is handsome; she thinks Clark Kent is a dweeb.)

I like the list of mower parts.

Lewis Turco, your Book of Forms is wonderful and I adore it forever, but I can't agree with you about this. As others have pointed out, poets have been pushing the conventions of the English sonnet since Petrarch.

(Oh well. Thank you for all the wonderful poetry words. And here I am being a logic stickler, just the way you're a iambic pentameter stickler. Just don't start saying bad things about feminism, and I can live with the cognitive dissonance.)

Some links with Marvell's "Mower's Song"--

The younger and older man contrasted--

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 ;
. . .

The lopped grass and man--

And flowers, and grass, and I, and all,
Will in one common ruin fall ;

Like some others, I’m having trouble with the logic of the first two lines; the rest of the poem suggests that “I” think “I’m” a “boy,” not the other way around.

But after that confusion, this has a simple charm to it, convincingly linking man, nature, and scripture.

As for form, one thing I love about the sonnet form is its conciseness—and trimeter makes for an even more concise “moment’s monument,” well-suited for this modest but thoughtful moment.

How about:

The boy who mows my yard
Is the boy who used to be me

one I used way back.

Actually, I kind of prefer Clark. At least he's not a fly-by-night...
Lois (E)laine