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 ;).