“The Mower’s Song” is the last of the three Mower Poems that Marvell wrote around 1652 while a tutor to Maria Fairfax at Nunappleton House.
Like the “The Mower to the Glow-worms” and most of “Damon the
Mower”, the poem is an utterance—as in “Damon”, a song—that
addresses a now purely unsympathetic landscape from within that
landscape. It follows a unique structure: five stanzas of three
rhyming couplets, the final line of each an alexandrine. The last
two lines work as a refrain. The last line is identical in each
stanza, while the penultimate line is almost identical.
Despite the potential difficulty of the poem’s abstractions, it is the simplest of the Mower Poems in that it is almost …
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Citation: Prawdzik, Brendan. "The Mower's Song". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 August 2015 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=35653, accessed 21 November 2024.]
