Andrew Marvell, The Mower to the Glow-worms

Brendan Prawdzik (Penn State University)

Ed. by J A Roe, University of York
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.04: English Writing and Culture of the Seventeenth Century, 1625-1688.
Vol. editors: Jennifer Brady (Rhodes College), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne), Claire Preston (Queen Mary, University of London), J A Roe (University of York), Virginia Mason Vaughan (Clark University)

Dates

First circulation or publication c. 1652

Places

England (Publication/ performance; Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Poem

Resources

This briefest of the Mower Poems distills their sense of internal dislocation and homelessness within the pastoral landscape: “For she my mind hath so displaced/ That I can never find my home.” If the Mower Poems form a three-poem narrative, “The Mower to the Glow-worms” is literally and figuratively at its center.

The poem is neatly ordered into four stanzas of four lines that, in their respective place in each stanza, follow the same general syntactical structure. Remarkably, these stanzas join together to form a single sentence, with the glow-worms addressed three ways before they are told, with a note of finality, that their service no longer has use, since the mower is forlorn. It is a delightful lyric, but, like so …

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905 words

Citation: Prawdzik, Brendan. "The Mower to the Glow-worms". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 June 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35640, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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