Landscape with Tractor

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Landscape with Tractor

Henry Taylor 1983

Originally published in the Summer, 1983 issue of Ploughshares, “Landscape with Tractor” is the opening poem in Henry Taylor’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, The Flying Change, published in 1985. Included in a section titled “Heartburn,” the poem is a meditative narrative framed by rhetorical questions the speaker asks. The “you” to whom he addresses his questions, however, is as much a part of himself as it is the reader. Like many of the poems in the collection, this one deals with themes of memory, loss, and change, specifically the ways in which human beings are able (or not) to accommodate change, and to integrate traumatic memories into their lives. In twelve quatrains (units of four lines) the poem’s introspective speaker describes a scenario in which he discovers the body of a woman while mowing his field. The speaker is changed forever by the experience and haunted by the image of the woman and the meaning of her life. The speaker’s tone shows indignation at having his peaceful life interrupted as well as frustration at what the event will mean to his life. The landscape is both physical (the speaker’s field) and psychological (the speaker’s consciousness). The physical landscape of the poem is a familiar one in Taylor’s poetry and his life. He was born and raised on a farm in rural Virginia and knows intimately the ways of the country. The psychological landscape is one of a person who has been changed forever by an event but is unable to grasp the significance of that change.

Author Biography

Henry Splawn Taylor’s knowledge of rural life and the natural world is rooted in his own experience. Born in Lincoln, Virginia, in 1942 to Thomas Edward and Mary Splawn Taylor, Taylor grew up on a large farm with his parents and three sisters. His father was an educator, farmer, and horse trainer, and Taylor himself developed an early love for riding horses. This passion is evident in many of Taylor’s poems, especially those in The Flying Change, his 1986 Pulitzer Prize winning volume. Taylor sometimes refers to his childhood in the country as “Edenic.”

Taylor was also blessed to grow up in a culturally rich environment. Neighbors of the Taylors included the painter Arshile Gorky, the guitarist Carlos Montoya, and the photographer Marion Post Wolcott, all of whom socialized with Taylor’s family. He not only learned about music and art from these neighbors but he developed a positive image of what an artist was as well. Taylor’s parents, whom Taylor referred to as Tom and Mary even when he was a child, were passionate about the arts. His father introduced him to the poems of Edward Arlington Robinson, and in the ninth grade Taylor became absorbed in the stories of Ambrose Bierce. Perhaps more than anyone, though, Taylor has been influenced by the storytelling and conversation of his grandfather, Henry B. Taylor.

Taylor attended public schools until the ninth grade, when he switched to George School, a Quaker facility his grandmother, sisters, and cousins also attended the school at one time or another. It was at George School that Taylor developed his desire to be a writer. After graduating high school, Taylor enrolled at the University of Virginia. There he became fast friends with Richard Diller and Kelly Cherry, who have themselves gone on to become well-respected writers. He also met the writer George Garrett, who joined the University of Virginia’s faculty in 1962. Garret is both mentor and friend to Taylor, and one of his strongest admirers. Upon graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1965, Taylor enrolled in the M.A. program in creative writing from Hollins College, from which he graduated in 1966. For most of his professional life Taylor has worked as an editor and teacher, serving as associate editor of Magill’s Literary Annual, and teaching at a number of universities, including Roanoke College, the University of Utah, and the American University in Washington, D.C., where he is currently Professor of English.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

The title of the poem “Landscape with Tractor” suggests that the composition will be descriptive. Titles with “Landscape” in them are more popular with paintings, and the title suggests the poem will be in that tradition. The poem opens with a question about a supposedly hypothetical situation. This “what if?” scenario, addressed to the second person “you,” asks readers to picture a house off a dirt road with “three acres of grass bounded / By road, driveway, and vegetable garden.” This pastoral setting evokes a feeling of rural calm and self sufficiency. It is a paradise of sorts that the speaker asks readers to imagine themselves in.

Stanza 2

A character, the “you,” is put into motion. The details that follow suggest that the speaker, not the reader, is being addressed. The speaker is addressing an imagined part of himself. He describes the rituals of maintaining the piece of land around his house, “to give grass a chance, and keep weeds down.” By using a bushhog, which is the name for a tractor that can cut large areas of grass, the speaker is not cutting the grass “down to lawn,” but leaving it a little bit wild, perhaps to remind himself of nature’s capacity to grow, and to distinguish his field from suburban lawns.

Stanza 3

The speaker describes a man daydreaming while in the midst of cutting grass. The man is the poet, and the landscape is as much a mental landscape of someone habituated to routine as it is a physical landscape. The language is informal. “Call it August” suggests that it could be any month, that the exact time doesn’t matter. Such a device allows the speaker to distance the description of the event while simultaneously clueing the reader that he is talking about himself. As in most of this poem Taylor uses various poetic devices, including alliteration (“green and growing”) and internal rhymes (“growing” and “mowing”), to provide texture to his description, to create the verbal landscape in which his physical and mental landscape is embodied.

Stanza 4

Into this well-ordered and ordinary physical landscape and the distracted, but ordinary mental landscape of the speaker something appears that needs to be made sense of. Rather than say what this thing is, Taylor has the speaker discover it at the same time as the reader, heightening anticipation. His tone becomes agitated when he says that “People / Will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.” And the opening question of the poem now sounds more like a complaint, similar to when someone says, “How would you like it if … ?.”

Stanza 5

The intrusion into the speaker’s world of a “clothing-store dummy” surprises him, but does not deter him from his routine, which he continues. The tone of disgust in the previous stanza is continued, as the speaker must “contend” with the dummy. To heighten the suspense of the unfolding story Taylor uses a run-on line to end a stanza for the first time in the poem.

Stanza 6

The sense that this is a hypothetical story is now abandoned as more details are provided. The true nature of the object is revealed to the reader at the same time it is discovered by the narrator, who is shocked by his find. Instead of describing his emotions, he speaks of his perceptions of the landscape: “The field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.” The fragments “Telephones. Sirens.” of

Media Adaptations

Watrershed Tapes distributes Taylor’s 1985 audiocassette, Landscape with Tractor. Watershed Tapes can be ordered online at http://www.watershed.winnipeg.mb.ca/

the third line underscore the breathlessness of the speaker, and his description of the doctors turning over the body with pitchforks shows us the narrator’s disgust with the scene.

Stanza 7

The description reads almost like a crime report. We are provided with more details of the corpse’s identity, although no name is attached. The parallelism of the last two sentences emphasizes the speaker’s reaction to the body. His routine is interrupted, and he stops work for the day.

Stanza 8

Rather than telling readers how he has been affected, the speaker shows the effect through imagery. Now, however, it is the imagery of absence, the “damp dent” where the body had been, and the “bluebottle flies … swirling” above the space. The bushhog takes on symbolic importance here, as it removes all evidence of the death, of the intrusion of the outside world into the orderliness and routine of the speaker’s life.

Stanza 9

In small towns the post office is often the place where neighbors meet and news is disseminated. This stanza contrasts with stanza seven, where the reader is told that the woman’s death was “no mystery.” In this stanza the woman’s life is a mystery. Her identity remains unknown. This stanza begins a series where sentences run over into the next stanza, creating a rhythmic urgency that will continue until the end of the poem.

Stanzas 10-12

The fleetingness of life and identity is addressed. The speaker asks a rhetorical question, addressed simultaneously to readers and to himself. He has had a life-shattering experience yet must continue with his life. He questions how he will be able to accommodate this experience into his routine, especially when he is reminded of it on a regular basis. The more he thinks about the woman’s absence, the more present she becomes, as he adds details to his previous description of her. Readers know what she was wearing and the effects of decomposition on her body. His obsession with the woman grows, and the poem’s ends with his realization, posed in the form of a question, that it will be with him until he dies.

Themes

Order and Disorder

“Landscape with Tractor” illustrates how the ways in which humans think about the world and themselves can be drastically changed by a single incident. Such incidents often come as a surprise and remain in a person’s consciousness, altering it forever. The first third of Taylor’s poem describes the setting of the speaker’s home and his routine of mowing the field. It is a pastoral setting, and the “grass bounded / By road, driveway, and vegetable garden” suggests an orderliness to the speaker’s existence, boundaries which demarcate his life and activities. This orderliness is also underscored through the speaker’s capacity to do his work without really thinking about it, “with half your mind / On something you’d rather be doing, or did once.” This doing without thinking is also evident when he first sees an object in his field and thinks it’s a mannequin. The idea that it might be a human body doesn’t enter into the speaker’s mind because it is not part of his expectations. When he discovers the mannequin is actually a corpse, his world is changed forever; he is thrust into the present. The sixth stanza shows the torrent of emotion the speaker experiences, and the succeeding stanzas detail the way in which the image of the woman’s body grows in the speaker’s imagination unchecked. With each stanza something new about the woman is revealed to the speaker, but each piece of information only makes the woman’s death more mysterious. Both her identity and the motivation behind her killing remain unknown. The disorder that the memory of the woman’s body introduces into the speaker’s life, a disorder that emerges each time the speaker mows over the “damp dent” where the body once was, changes his world, but the effect is unclear to the reader and the speaker. The poem, which reads as an attempt to come to grips with this experience, whether it was actual or imagined, serves as a metaphor for any such experience. By ending the poem with the question “How would it be?” Taylor thrusts the speaker’s experience into readers’ minds, asking them to imagine how such an event would change their own lives.

Death

“Landscape with Tractor” relates a story of experience encroaching on innocence. The poem echoes the story of the Garden of Eden. The speaker’s field represents a contemporary version of the garden. It is isolated, with plenty of land and a vegetable garden. The speaker does not have to work very hard, mowing the grass infrequently (every six weeks). Into this paradise comes death in the form of what appears to be “a clothing-store dummy.” This interruption into the dreamy world of the speaker and his country home jolts the speaker. He must now “contend” with death as real and human, and present, rather than thinking about it as a seasonal thing that happens to his garden and field. The knowledge that death brings to the speaker changes him irrevocably, and changes his relationship to his field, nature. Although his bush-hog can eliminate all physical traces of the body, the speaker cannot get the image of the woman out of his mind. Details about her death flood him whenever he thinks of her. She reminds him of the possibility of his own death. When he says that “she will stay in that field” until he dies, he is using “field” not only to denote the physical field that he tends, but his own field of consciousness as well. In his consciousness an awareness of mortality has been planted and continues to grow. By wondering about the circumstances of the dead woman’s life and the way in which she went from being “Someone” into “no one,” the speaker implicitly wonders about the meaning of his own existence and the inevitability of his death.

The title “Landscape with Tractor” suggests that it will be in the tradition of landscape paintings. Such paintings as Bruegel’s “Winter Landscape with the Bird Trap” are meditations on place that ask viewers to look more closely at a familiar scene, or to look at a scene in a new way. Taylor’s poem is a meditation and a narrative: that is, it tells a story of a particular event while simultaneously exploring the meaning of that event. Characters in the story include country doctors, the dead woman, townspeople, and the speaker himself. Although the speaker addresses the second person “you” throughout the

Topics for Further Study

Brainstorm in writing or discussion about a time when a particular event changed the way that you experienced a part of your daily routine, then write a “Before and After” essay detailing that change and its consequences.
Taking the position of the “you” in “Landscape with Tractor,” write an essay answering the questions that the speaker poses.
Compose a description of a rural Garden of Eden as it would look in the twentieth century, and then compose one of an urban Garden of Eden. Discuss the similarities and differences in your descriptions and what these tell you about your own conception of paradise.

poem, the way in which he relates details and the poem’s tone suggests that he is also addressing a part of himself. In doing this, he is attempting to understand the impact of this event on his life.

Explaining the use of his persona in the poem, Taylor wrote in an email to this critic stating, “My not having had the actual experience is the main reason for the poem’s slightly unusual use of second-and first-person narration. For most of the way, the second-person narration is not noticeably different from that of many poems where ‘I’ seems to have been changed to ‘you’ for no better reason than to avoid ‘I.’ Near the end, though, the narrator suddenly intrudes in the first person, saying “And I ask you again, how would it be?” By that time I was interested not only in trying to avoid claiming the experience too fully for myself, but also in trying to make a small comment on the tendency to use ‘you’ for ‘I.’”

The speaker’s tone is one of a measured bewilderment and growing resignation. He has enough emotional distance from the event to recall it in some detail, yet he has not yet been able to integrate its impact into his life. By using a steady rhythmic base and quatrains (four line stanzas), the most common stanza form in English versification,

Compare & Contrast

1985: Cellular phones are introduced into automobiles.

Today: Due to the increase in accidents caused by people driving while talking on their cellular phones, some states and cities are considering making it a crime to drive and talk.
1970: The rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the United States is 7.9 per one hundred thousand people.

1980: The rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the United States is 10.2 per one hundred thousand people.

1990: The rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the United States is 9.4 per one hundred thousand people.

1995: The rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in the United States is 8.2 per one hundred thousand people.
1980: A mentally ill fan, Mark Chapman, fatally shoots former Beatle John Lennon outside his apartment in New York City.

1981: A mentally ill man, John Hinkley, Jr., shoots President Reagan and three others. All survive.

1995: Former football star, O.J. Simpson is acquitted after being accused of murdering his wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend. The trial is marked by racial tension.
1980: Reagan names Elizabeth Dole as his Secretary of Transportation.

1984: Walter Mondale names Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate for president of the United States, the first time a woman is nominated for a national office by a major party.

1999: Elizabeth Dole runs in the presidential primaries, faring poorly before she bows out.

Taylor underscores the inherent tension in the speaker’s voice. This tension is underscored by the repeated use of the speaker’s rhetorical question, “How would it be?” Rhetorical questions are questions used for effect and are not asked in order to be answered.

Historical Context

In 1980 Americans elected as president Ronald Reagan, a conservative Republican and former actor best known for his strident anti-communism and telegenic presence. Reagan appealed to both traditional conservative Republicans as well as working-class Democrats, who saw in him a no-nonsense leader committed to limiting the federal government’s interference with state government and the individual. Republicans also captured control of the Senate for the first time since 1952. The economic policies of Reagan’s administration, sometimes derisively called “Reaganomics,” included massive tax cuts, which in turn led to a ballooning federal budget deficit. The administration acted to speed up deregulation of such industries as airlines, banking, and domestic oil production to foster competition and lower prices for consumers. Claiming that federal programs for the needy sapped their initiative, Reagan instituted “welfare reform.” In 1984 the country re-elected Reagan, who soundly defeated Walter Mondale and his running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for a national office by a major party.

Though Taylor wrote and published the poem in the 1980s, the event on which “Landscape with Tractor” is based occurred in the late 1960s or early 1970s, according to the poet. However, it wasn’t Taylor who found the body on his land, but an employee of Taylor’s father who worked on the Taylor family farm. Until this day, the woman’s identity remains unknown, as do the exact circumstances of her death. Taylor recalled hearing the story from his father while he was still teaching at the University of Utah, where he was on the faculty from 1968-1971. The line between fact and fiction is often blurred in poetry, and poets often take “poetic license,” “borrowing” events from other people’s lives or inhabiting other voices. In an essay about his own life in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Taylor wrote: “When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I felt no obligation to be faithful to autobiographical fact, and wrote several far-fetched poetical fictions in which the speaker was not readily distinguishable from that person who, as I see it, is me.” In an email to the critic, Taylor notes, “The voice and manner of the poem are, I think, influenced by my reading of Robert Penn Warren’s poems, which I came to love in the 1970s, having previously felt no more for them than respectful admiration. For a little while there in the 70s, I read his poems more avidly than I read any others.” Warren, perhaps best known for his novel All the Kings Men, was also a southern writer. He died in 1989.

Critical Overview

“Landscape with Tractor,” which was initially published in a 1983 issue of Ploughshares, has been reprinted a number of times, appearing in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets (1985) and The Ploughshares Reader (1987). Watershed Tapes of Washington, D.C., released an audio-casette “Landscape with Tractor,” which features the poet reading 22 other poems as well as the title piece. Reviewing Taylor’s Pulitzer-prize winning collection, The Flying Change, in which “Landscape with Tractor” appears, David Shapiro claimed in Poetry that Taylor crafts his poems, “as house, as space, as dwelling.” Citing the first stanza of the poem, Shapiro noted that “Taylor’s poems concern boundaries and the pride of boundaries.” Though he had been writing and publishing poetry for twenty years before he won the prize, Taylor was not well known to the public, but then few poets are. In the introduction to his bibliographic chronicle of Taylor’s published work from 1961-1987, Stuart Wright stated that most “poets and critics alike, felt that this recognition had been far too long in coming.” Writing for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Taylor’s mentor and friend George Garret, seconded that sentiment, claiming that Taylor’s formalism has often worked against his poetry becoming better known: “If Taylor’s work has received some recognition from poets of an older generation and some serious and favorable attention from some of the poets of his own age, his work is not nearly so well known, yet, as it might be. In forms and content, style and substance, he is not so much out of fashion as deliberately, determinedly unfashionable. His love of forms is (for the present) unfashionable.”

Criticism

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky’s essays and poems regularly appear in literary journals and magazines. He is currently working on an anthology of poems and stories about Eve, titled “The Lady and Her Snake.” In this essay, Semansky examines how Taylor’s poem is both a description of a traumatic event and a psychological portrait of the speaker.

Henry Taylor draws on the landscape tradition associated with painting in his poem, “Landscape with Tractor.” Historically, landscape paintings have often been considered meditations on a place. An artist’s use of color, light, texture, and perspective is intended to show the place in a new way, or perhaps in a manner that is thoroughly familiar. In Taylor’s poem, however, place is as much a psychological landscape as it is a physical one. In recounting an event that changed his life, the speaker of the poem creates an emotional terrain that tells readers about his fears and desires and, in the process, asks readers to reflect on their own.

The poem’s first stanza describes a place and asks readers how it would be if they took off to that place, “a house set well back from a dirt road, / With … three acres of grass bounded / By road, driveway, and vegetable garden.” This image of well-ordered isolation dominates the poem. It is not only a physical isolation (readers are not told of any other people at the house) but an isolation of the speaker’s psyche. The borders of the speaker’s land are also, symbolically, the borders of his mind. He tends both, cultivating familiarity and routine in his actions and thinking. His work structured according to the seasons, the speaker appears content in the first few stanzas to mow his field just enough to keep it maintained.

The tractor is the other term in the poem’s title and appears in the second stanza as a symbol of seemingly benign technology. However, the tractor is also the means by which the speaker orders his land. While he sits on the tractor, the speaker’s mind can wander; he doesn’t have to pay close attention to his work. The tractor, then, as symbol of

“A painting might depict the scene of the first three stanzas in watercolor grays, light blues, and greens of a man mowing his field, his features undefined, maybe facing away from the viewer. In the foreground of the painting is the image of the body in stark relief, red and black.”

modern technology, not only saves labor for the speaker, but frees his mind from the details of daily work. It is into this kind of hazy, daydreaming, unfocused, yet routinized mind that the image of the “clothing-store dummy” intrudes. A painting might depict the scene of the first three stanzas in water-color grays, light blues, and greens of a man mowing his field, his features undefined, maybe facing away from the viewer. In the foreground of the painting is the image of the body in stark relief, red, and black.

The landscape of the speaker’s mind contains images of human beings in general and of city people in particular. These images are rooted in generalizations that often approach stereotype. They show a mind comfortable thinking “inside the box,” inured to new ideas or ways of seeing the world. When the speaker first spots the corpse he doesn’t know what it is, saying “People / will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.” The word choice here underscores the speaker’s irateness of having his routine interrupted and of people in general. It suggests he’s had his pastoral home sullied before by the rudeness of people in cars, presumably from the city. That he continues mowing instead of stopping and that he says he has to “contend” with the dummy, underscores his attitude towards this interruption in his day.

The image of the country doctors comes close to caricature. They move the body by pitchfork, a farming tool, something city people don’t expect of doctors, but might of “country” practitioners. The doctors’ action is disturbing: it suggests a casual, if not disrespectful, attitude towards the human body. The woman is black, a fact introduced a few lines later. Although the race of the speaker isn’t mentioned, readers can reasonably infer that he is white by the simple fact that he includes the detail of the woman’s race in his description. The image also has symbolic resonance. The ripening corpse is like a fertilizer, which the doctors are turning, helping the break in the speaker’s routine grow into an event that will obsess him. The removal of the corpse only increases his inability to resume his life, as he is reminded of her by “the damp dent in the tall grass/ where bluebottle flies are still swirling.” The mystery of her life and death only deepens.

The speaker attempts to make sense of the woman’s death. His own distrust of city people is shared by other town folk:

Weeks pass. You hear at the post office
That no one comes forward to say who she was.
Brought out from the city, they guess, and dumped
like a bag of beer cans. She was someone,
and now is no one, buried or burned
or dissected; but gone….

The suddenness by which a person can lose their life and whatever meaning it held hits the speaker. Though intimately aware of the cycles of growth and death in nature, the speaker is shocked by the woman’s death, by the way her body is treated like trash by those who dumped her (though he shows no such shock at how the doctors treated her). This shock also carries a degree of indignation, as the intrusion of the city and its ugliness into his pastoral paradise prevents him from continuing his own well-ordered and predictable life in the country. In the tenth stanza he asks how it would be if “you” could not get the image of the corpse out of your mind. In doing so, he is in effect registering his frustration at the degree to which the intruding image is engulfing his consciousness. He is also wondering what this will do to his life from now on.

The question implies that this experience has changed the speaker and will change him further. His relationship to his field has changed, as he will no longer be able to complete his work mindlessly. And his relationship to his own mind has changed, as he must work to regulate his growing awareness of death and its inherent mysteries. His constant questioning underscores the tumult of his consciousness. The more he questions, however, the deeper the mystery. When the speaker initially encounters the woman he doesn’t even recognize her humanity; she looks like a mannequin. But the more he thinks about her, in her absence, the more human she becomes, until in the penultimate stanza he describes her as “the form in the grass, the bright yellow skirt,/ black shoes, the thing not quite like a face/ whose gaze blasted past you at nothing.” Curiously, the addition of these details curiously give the woman more presence in the speaker’s mind and in readers’ minds.

In the final stanza the speaker returns to the image of the doctors turning her over. He is left “To wonder, / from now on, what dope deal, betrayal, / or innocent refusal, brought her here.” The speaker elaborates on the kind of presence by listing possible reasons for her death. The only specific reason in the list is the “dope deal,” which reverberates in readers’ minds because of his previous description of the woman as being from the city. The presence of such a reason illustrates the way the speaker thinks in stereotypes. His inability to think about or describe anyone in the poem in a positive manner feeds readers’ sense of the speaker as a disillusioned person who finds it difficult to participate in the human community in any emotionally meaningful way.

Discovering the woman, however, has given him reason not only to think about other people’s lives but to think about his own death. Though the end of the poem suggests that this woman’s death will forever haunt the speaker in his country paradise, on a larger scale it argues for the idea that no human is an island, and that no matter how much humans may try to separate themselves from other human beings, connection and responsibility remain.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Jonathan N. Barron

Jonathan N. Barron is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has co-edited Jewish American Poetry (University Press of New England), Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (University of Missouri Press) as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on the poetic movement, New Formalism. Beginning in 2001 he will be the editor in chief of The Robert Frost Review.

Race, perhaps the most difficult and necessary topic to beset contemporary American literature, manifests itself in Taylor’s poem, “Landscape with Tractor,” and becomes its main subject and theme. Rather than claim that race is an essential determining characteristic of people, the poem instead

What Do I Read Next?

“Landscape with Tractor” is included in Taylor’s Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, The Flying Change, published in 1985. Many of these poems are formal (about one fourth are sonnets) and address the ordinariness of country life and the nature of change.
For an understanding of Taylor’s own critical sensibilities, read his 1992 collection of essays Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets. In this collection Taylor trains his critical eye on poets such as Louis Simpson, William Stafford, and Louis Simpson.
Dan Johnson interviews Henry Taylor in the 1976 issue of Window magazine. Taylor discusses his own approach towards writing and his thoughts on contemporary poetry.

reveals the problematic thoughts and guilty associations that arise by the mere presence of a black woman’s corpse on a white man’s farm. In telling this story, Taylor’s poem blends two literary genres, southern literature and pastoral poetry.

To understand this poem, then, one needs to know a bit about both of these genres. To begin with the ancient pastoral tradition, one need only know that it takes as its central characters, shepherds or, in this case, farmers. In the conventional pastoral poem, the shepherd meditates on the relationship between nature and the city. Usually, these meditations lead to speculations and critiques of various social institutions: the best most representative example of such pastorals are Virgil’s Eclogues. Indeed, it is just such Eclogues that Taylor invokes in his own “Landscape with Tractor.” This poem, in the first person voice of a farmer, is typical of the genre because it maintains the conventions of a rural man who depicts social institutions and the conflict between the country and the city by invoking nature. It departs from pastoral conventions because it is so modern. Instead of an ancient shepherd, this farmer is a contemporary

“Rather than claim that race is an essential determining characteristic of people, the poem instead reveals the problematic thoughts and guilty associations that arise by the mere presence of a black woman’s corpse on a white man’s farm.”

man who drives a “bushhog” to cut the grass of his three acre field. Still, his meditation on the grass ends up being as much about the social world of the city as any classical eclogue. Another departure from the conventional form is the fact that Taylor’s farmer, instead of speaking to another farmer, speaks directly to the reader. At first, one thinks the speaker is merely discussing the merits of a particular method of cutting grass. In fact, however, he is asking how the reader would have reacted had the reader discovered the body he has found. By introducing a plot about the discovery of a dead African-American woman on a white farmer’s land, Taylor summons the poem’s second dominant literary genre, the themes and conventions of southern literature.

Specifically, southern literature is said to consist of the “tragic sensibility.” Ever since the Civil War, southern literature has developed its own thematic concerns both in poetry and in fiction. To summarize, southern writers depict their mostly rural, agrarian region as a place lost, defeated, isolated, and forgotten by the ongoing history of 20th century industrial life. Linked to this tragic sensibility, however, is a focus on tradition, family, heritage, and place. The sensibility is “tragic” in the classical sense because it claims for the south the moral, ethical truth of American society. Southern literature, in other words, laments the tragic fact that the real moral center of place, heritage, family has been lost and will not soon, if ever, return to dominate American life. Southern writers usually insist that these qualities make the south stronger, morally better than the United States’ more industrialized regions. Southern literature, then, is tragic because it accepts as final the loss of faith in tradition, family, and the importance of place to one’s sense of self.

By the 1940s, just when Taylor was born, this tragic sensibility came to dominate southern fiction. Eventually, southern writers in the 1940s developed a particular subset of southern literature, the Southern Gothic. Like southern literature generally, it incorporated a great deal of symbolism and myth into its fictions, but it also emphasized the grotesque, strange, and bizarre events and characters that populate what is a predominantly rural region. In turn, the emphasis on the grotesque and the bizarre went hand in hand with a focus on the problem of evil in human affairs.

In this same decade, another event that was not necessarily literary but did help to shape and announce what would be the dominant concern of post World War II America occurred. In 1944, one of the more important sociological studies to effect American life was published: Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. That book made the problem of race in America, specifically legalized discrimination in the south, a new and urgent political issue. Ultimately, this book would be a major source of evidence for the Supreme Court’s ruling on desegregation in 1954. An American Dilemma, however, merely told in scientific prose what the southern novelists had long been depicting. For the most part, in other words, the southern novel was an anti-racist, anti-segregationist affair. Whatever the stance of the particular writer, though, southern literature made it quite clear that to write about the south was to write about race relations: their depiction was as fundamental to southern literature as were the new focus on the gothic and the grotesque that came to such prominence in the 1940s.

Therefore, when Taylor, already in his forties, published his third book in 1985, The Flying Change, the book from which “Landscape with Tractor” is taken, he was already participating both in the continuation of the ancient pastoral form, and in the revival of poetry as a major form for southern literature. As a poet in the south, Taylor could not help but know that southern literature had distinguished itself not through its poetry but through its prose: fiction writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O’Conner, and Eudrora Welty had far surpassed in literary influence their poetic peers. He knew this in part because he was born and educated in Virginia where he was initiated through his family and his own interests into southern literature and its concerns. According to the writer George Garrett, however, Taylor had a unique perspective on the southern themes of heritage, place, and family, since he came from a family and a community of Quakers dating back to eighteenth-century Virginia. In other words, Taylor may have come from the south and been educated into its literary traditions, but his community had always been opponents to both war and slavery on moral, religious grounds.

Perhaps this dissenting heritage explains Taylor’s attraction to the poetry of James Dickey. Another southerner, but also a generation older than Taylor, Dickey was critical of some of the region’s literary conventions. In fact, Dickey was the first poet significantly to change the assumption that southern literature ought to consist solely of fiction. When he burst on the scene with his narrative poetry, he incorporated into the forms of pastoral poetry the themes and plot lines of southern fiction.

Thanks to Dickey’s precedent, then, Taylor had a place, stylistically speaking, already waiting for him when he began to publish. It was as if Dickey had given him permission to write his stories in verse instead of in prose. Unlike Dickey, though, Taylor extended his narrative thrust: his poetry is often far more willing even then Dickey to spin a yarn. In fact, Taylor’s use of narrative has often been somewhat controversial because, ever since the 1960s, American poets have preferred poems that avoid too much story and plot. But taking his cue from Dickey, Taylor has told story after story in each of his books.

The story told in “Landscape with Tractor” is particularly notable because it links the narrative tradition of southern literature (particularly its gothic variant) to the structure of a pastoral poem. The play of genres, however, is not what makes this an important poem. Rather, it is the thematic result of this combination that matters. For thanks to his manipulation of the conventions of both genres, Taylor is able to sharpen his own focus on race, the real subject of his poem. Both southern literature and the pastoral require, as part of their structure, that the writer deal with, and engage, social themes. Both southern literature and the pastoral are incredibly social genres. By definition, they both require writers to examine the people who live in specific well defined rural communities. By contrast, if one were to focus in one’s poem only on an individual or only on a pure description one would not be writing either the conventional pastoral, or conventional southern literature. Therefore, Taylor’s “Landscape with Tractor” becomes one of the key documents in contemporary American literary discussions about race and racism precisely because it so successfully blends the southern literary tradition and the ongoing tradition of pastoral poetry. It is precisely because Taylor blends two fundamentally social genres together that he is able to get inside the story of race in America.

That this social element of Taylor’s poem has been well understood is clear from perhaps the best reading of the poem so far. That reading, interestingly enough, does not come from an essay but rather from a poem, “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses” by the African American poet, Toi Derricotte. In her poetic response to Taylor, she implicitly comments on Taylor’s racial theme. But before explaining Derricotte’s critique, a more detailed glance at Taylor’s poem is in order.

The poem, in twelve stanzas of four lines each, relies on meter for its rhythm. Usually, four-line stanzas indicate a ballad. This would make sense since the ballad is the most common English language form for telling stories in poetry. But ballads depend on a particular rhyme (abab) and a particular meter (four beats, tetrameter, alternating with three beats, trimeter). Although this poem does have a ballad’s four line stanza it does not have either its rhyme or its meter. In other words, the poem is not a simple country tale about the common folk, low subjects fit for a low form. It may be possible to say that these lines are in three beats. But to do this one would have to know that, already by his third book, Taylor himself was known for his use of the anapestic foot, something he learned, so George Garrett tells us, from James Dickey. The anapest, two unstressed syllables followed by a stress, would allow one to read Taylor’s lines as trimeter, a common meter for ballads. But, to my ear at any rate, these lines scan better as pentameter. In other words, even the ghost of a reference to the ballad in the form of a three beat line is less likely than the more conventional, more serious five beat line, (pentameter). This means that the poem is more serious than a ballad. Because ballads are not the pastoral genre’s most impressive form, because ballads are considered low and often anti-intellectual, it ought not to be surprising that this poem would look like a ballad even though it actually scans in the same meter as Shakespeare’s sonnets and Wordsworth’s great period poems.

Ultimately, the fact that it is so difficult to determine the exact meter of these lines tells us even more about its theme: in America, when it comes to race, nothing is simple, nothing is easily deciphered. To clue readers into the ambiguity of race that this poem will explore, Taylor makes his own meter fundamentally ambiguous as well.

Also, he is equally deceptive in his word choice and language. The poem seems so simple, there is virtually no need to look up any word in the dictionary, for example. But this simple diction is as ambiguous as the meter. For what seems to be so straightforward is, in fact, a mystery so deep that, by the end of the poem, no language can adequately explain it.

Turning now to the poem itself one notices that from the very first, Taylor invites us into his speaker’s mind. We are not just a witness to what he discovers, but we are also made to undergo the same shock and moral crisis that he undergoes as well. The poem begins:

How would it be if you took yourself off
To a house set well back from a dirt road,
With, say, three acres of grass bounded
By road, driveway, and vegetable garden?

In these lines the reader is offered an invitation. Why not go to a pleasant three acre farm? Small and compact it might offer an attractive meal and a fine time of conversation and fun. Invited into this farm, Taylor’s speaker then continues to ask what the reader would do. In the second and third stanza, he tells how the reader would mow the field. He brings the reader into the visceral experience of riding the “bushhog.” In the fourth stanza, after the readers have been asked to become this farmer, he introduces the gothic, grotesque element into the poem. At first neither he nor first time readers know what he’s talking about. The fourth stanza merely tells that “we glimpse it.” The farmer’s first reaction is, therefore, meant to be the same as the reader’s, and then to think as he thinks: “People / Will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.”

The first encounter with the corpse, then, is annoyance. Typical of pastoral poetry, the farmer signals his disgust with city folk who have no concern for the fields that gives them the food they eat and much of the clothes they wear. Angry that passersby would throw “crap” from their cars, Taylor’s speaker, in the next stanza, gets a closer look. He thinks what he sees is “a clothing-store dummy.” He cannot believe how rude, how amazingly weird, city folk are. That they would throw a dummy on his field! Knowing, as the reader does after finishing the poem, however, that this is, in fact, a dead woman, the initial response of Taylor’s speaker is not only upsetting, but, because the body is of a black woman, it is also potentially racist. Blacks as mere property; blacks as mere dummies, blacks as cast off goods. Are not these the same sentiments that have had such a powerful and enduring reality in the south? To this speaker’s horror, although he knows himself not to be racist, his first reaction to the body was, in terms of race in America, classically racist. At this point, guilt, always a moral emotion, enters into the poem. It explains why he had to make his readers literally share in his experience as if it were happening to them for the very first time. He needs his readers to feel as he feels in order to prove that his first thoughts about this woman are not racist thoughts.

Exactly half way through the poem, Taylor realizes just what has been left on his field: “the field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.” Here, Taylor captures the delirium of his discovery. What follows likens the corpse to what, in her famous song, Billie Holiday called, a strange fruit. The harvest of this field is a “four days dead, and ripening” “well-dressed black woman.” In the next stanza, the reader learns that the cause of death is “no mystery: two bullet holes / In the breast.”

But rather than enter into the experience or imagined life of this woman, the poem then returns its focus back to the speaker and away from the woman. By returning to the speaker, the urgency of the opening question, “How would it be?” becomes all the more poignant and difficult. For now that the reader has been invited into this man’s life the reader must respond as he does to this discovery.

In the second half of the poem, the final six stanzas, he reports his response as a psychological and social dilemma, precisely the American dilemma Gunner Myrdal wrote of in his famous 1944 report. In the ninth stanza, “weeks pass.” Clearly still upset, the speaker seeks whatever news he can find about the woman. At the post office, he learns that she was brought out “from the city, they guess, and dumped / like a bag of beer cans.” Here the typical pastoral critique of the city joins an endemic racism common to the rural south. In the country, the white locals associate city folk with a cold, dispassionate lack of concern even as they are not surprised to see that black folk are no better than garbage. Taylor’s speaker does not share such racist views but he reports what he hears and adds a wonderful enjambment that breaks his thought not only across a line but over a stanza as well, as if to indicate his profound disagreement with his neighbors. The stanza concludes: “She was someone.” That line does not end the sentence, however, which continues in the tenth stanza:

and now is no one, buried or burned
or dissected; but gone. And I ask you
again, how would it be? To go on with your life,
putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles …

Taylor’s speaker, unlike the men in the post office, understands that this body was a woman and that, despite her many connections and associations, the body has gone unclaimed. Whether her body went to science, to a crematorium, or to a grave the sad truth is that no one ever claimed her. By asking his opening question again, Taylor transforms the woman into a haunting presence that now inhabits his speaker’s land. For better or worse this woman is now part of his identity, his land, his place, his heritage. Could you, he asks his readers, go on with your life after seeing her? Even though, weeks later, there is only “that spot” where she once lay, her presence remains. The final lines of the final stanza ask:

… To wonder,
from now on, what dope deal, betrayal,
or innocent refusal, brought her here,
and to know she will stay in the field till you die?

Because her presence is unresolved, unexplained, he conjures up three explanations. She was involved in drugs, she was involved in some shady deal where she betrayed someone and paid for it with her life, or, perhaps, she was truly an innocent victim whose refusal to do whatever she had been asked to do got her killed. The fact that she is black and that she has been shot immediately brings the drug and betrayal connection to the speaker’s mind. Would he have had the same thoughts if a well-dressed white woman in her mid-thirties had been discovered, or, for a white woman, would only the last scenario present itself? This, too, is part of the poem’s sub-text of guilt. It hides beneath the more obvious social dimension of race. And it is that social dimension—the fact that this murdered woman is black—that matters most. Her presence on this white man’s farm, particularly in the southern context of the poems of The Flying Change, resonates symbolically. For in symbolic terms the black woman who has come back, as if from no where, to haunt him represents the black bodies of the south. They will and must haunt the southern landscape in order to challenge its claim to honor, integrity, and truth. No pastoral ideal of the land can dare deny or pretend that the black victims of the south do not exist. Typical of his Quaker, non-conformist background, Taylor asserts the typical themes of southern literature—community, history, place—but he does so, at the end, by asking just how much responsibility this seemingly innocent white farmer owes to the tragic history of the land he farms. Yes, the woman will stay with him until he dies, as much a part of his farm as he.

The reaction to Taylor’s third book was intense, so much so that it won the Pultizer Prize for the best book of poetry published in 1985. Of all the reactions to this collection, however, none is more compelling than the poem by Toi Derricotte that retells Taylor’s story. But Derricotte makes a significant change. She asks her readers to sympathize with the victim not the farmer:

Mowing his three acres with a tractor,
a man notices something ahead—a mannequin
—he thinks someone threw it from a car. Closer
he sees it is the body of a black woman.

Rather than ask how readers would feel had they found her, she asks how it feels to be like her; how it feels, to be, yourself, a black woman in a majority white country. She asks what it says about American culture that such events are so typical anyway: “How many black women / have been turned up to stare at us blankly” she asks. After meditating on this grim reality, she admits, in her concluding stanza, that “part of me wants to disappear,” but rather than disappear she instead asserts her affiliation with her African American community and heritage:

Then there is this part
that digs me up with this pen
and turns my sad black face to the light.

Facing the light of her identity, Derricotte uncovers what too many readers will be likely to want to ignore, or avoid, in Taylor’s poem. Her poem, in effect, says that it matters fundamentally and absolutely that the woman Taylor’s farmer discovers is black. Both poets, beginning with Taylor, turn their attention to the ongoing American dilemma that is race relations. As fit a subject for poetry as for prose.

Source: Jonathan N. Barron, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Adrian Blevins

Adrian Blevins, a poet and essayist who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System, is the author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, a chapbook of poems, and has published poems, stories, and essays in many magazines, journals, and anthologies. In this essay, Blevins

“… as the study of any number of writers who take a significant interest in the details of their own homelands will tell us, human universals always rise from specific details the color of the mountain and the odd, cool texture of the fishing stream.”

explores the psychological implications in Henry Taylor’s poem and argues that Taylor uses the details of his homeland as a backdrop to more internal meditations.

“Landscape with Tractor” is one of the most memorable poems in The Flying Change. It reveals, as many of Tayor’s poems do, the poet’s consciousness of the rift between the idyllic surface of the country landscape and the darker and more violent essence sometimes contained within that landscape and sometimes brought out from the city and dumped there. Despite the harsh aspects of the story told by “Landscape with Tractor,” the poem does not simply imply that the picturesque countryside has been invaded by the horrors of the more “civilized” world. The speaker’s more comprehensive realization is that humans must first learn to carry and then somehow bear all their eyes take in. Thus, there are psychological implications inherent in this poem implications about the enduring nature of experience and memory and about how each might work to inform, instruct, and appall the human psyche.

“Landscape with Tractor” is a fairly straightforward narrative poem. It tells a story in the present tense about a day at some point in the speaker’s past when he comes across the dead body of a “well-dressed black woman” in a field, that, “bounded / by road, drive way, and vegetable garden,” he often mowed with his tractor. In addition to relating the gruesome details of his discovery, saying that “Two local doctors use pitchforks / To turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening,” the speaker also expresses his initial reaction to it. He says that “the field tilts, whirls, then steadies as [he] runs,” and that the next day “bluebottle files are still swirling.” These details work to reveal that the experience the speaker is relating is in fact an authentic one there are no flights of imagination here, no make-believe murder-mystery or pretend foul-play. The poem then leaps to the speaker’s realization that the dead woman’s body will stay with him forever; the experience, he understands, has become a constant part of him, a knowledge and weight he must bear, as he says, to his own death.

“Landscape with Tractor” is filled with a range of glorious tensions. Although his work in forms can place Taylor among the contemporary American poets associating themselves with what is called The New Formalism, such a placement would be dreadfully reductive. Taylor, unlike some of the poets associated with this movement, is not merely concerned with the political and/or reactionary act of reviving traditional poetic forms. Rather, he is interested in exploring all possible methods for expressing his take on the human adventure, a project which sometimes leads him to marry both traditional and less well-known forms. The effect is a well-crafted tonal strain that is original and haunting.

“Landscape with Tractor” is written in well-controlled quatrains, or four-line-stanzas. The regularity of Taylor’s line and the order of his stanzas produces a tone of reserve; it is what American poet and critic Richard Dillard calls a “well-modulated voice.” But the speaker’s use of slang (as in “People / Will toss all kinds of crap from their cars”) as well as his use of a whole variety of idiomatic expressions (as in “it’s a clothing-store dummy, for God’s sake”) produces a tension that makes the speaker’s voice at once intimate and aloof. Thus, the speaker achieves, by way of his tone, the storyteller’s authority, which comes in part from his ability to appear to stand back from the events he is narrating. He also attains the poet’s authority, which comes from his ability to use any means necessary in this case narrative suspense, exacting details, heightened diction, a relatively consistent rhythm, and a final and surprising turn inward in order to express outrage and sorrow.

The speaker’s use of the second person, because it contains the power of direct address and approximates the pitches of everyday conversation, also helps him to achieve a tone of intimacy:

How would it be if you took yourself off
To a house set well back from a dirt road,

With, say, three acres of grass bounded
By road, driveway, and vegetable garden?

Taylor also addresses the reader explicitly toward the end of “Landscape with Tractor” when he states, “And I ask you / again, how would it be?” After this line, in a nice turn, the speaker seems to move inward, appearing in this greatest moment of emotional intensity to be talking to himself. Thus, one of the poem’s psychological progressions can be recognized—a movement from public to private utterance:

or dissected; but gone. And I ask you
again, how would it be? To go on with your life,
putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles,
and seeing, each time you pass that spot
the form in the grass….

Taylor moves in this most organic fashion away from the historian’s act of recording moments in telling detail to the poet’s act of exploring the ambiguities and complexities inherent in the more emotive realms of human experience. The fact that the poem begins and ends on unanswerable questions reinforces the unresolvable nature of the experience the speaker narrates. “Landscape with Tractor” strives not to answer questions about the fragility of human life or the violent essence of human nature; it seeks, instead, and perhaps in small memorial, to pose or submit the facts of a sad story in as straightforward a manner as possible, uncovering one of the most absolute of human truths. The speaker’s final realization reminds that violent or unacceptable experiences are psychologically permanent.

References to the significance of the region of many of Henry Taylor’s poems or to what American critic Peter Stitt calls “Mr. Taylor’s sense of nostalgia for his home territory” are not in and of themselves erroneous. Nevertheless, because it is possible for certain readers to over-emphasize the poetic significance of Taylor’s love and knowledge for Virginia farmland and folk (especially those contemporaries “bunched up in several urban areas,” as American writer and critic George Garrett calls them), it seems important to point out that the Taylor landscape is often as much scenery and setting as it is topic. Since Taylor works so beautifully in the narrative mode, his interest in atmosphere and background should not be surprising. Besides, as the study of any number of writers who take a significant interest in the details of their own homelands will tell us, human universals always rise from specific details the color of the mountain and the odd, cool texture of the fishing stream.

Source: Adrian Blevins, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 2001.

Sources

Derricotte, Toi, “On the Turning Up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses,” in Captivity, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Dillard, R. H. W., “The Flying Change,” in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIII, No 2, April, 1986, p. 15.

Garrett, George, “Henry Taylor,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series, Part II, Gale, 1980, pp. 322-27.

Horowitz, David, Peter N. Carroll, and David D. Lee, eds., On the Edge: A New History of 20th-century America, West Publishing Co., 1990.

Johnson, Dan, “An Interview With Henry Taylor,” in Window, Spring, 1976, pp. 1-21.

Meyers, Jack, and David Wojahn, eds. A Profile of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991.

Shapiro, David, “A Review of Henry Taylor’s The Flying Change,” in Poetry, March, 1987, pp. 348-350.

Stitt, Peter, “Landcapes and Still Lives,” in New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1986, pp. 22-3.

Taylor, Henry, Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets, Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

———, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Vol. 7, Gale, 1988. pp. 171-89.

———, The Flying Change, Louisiana State University Press, 1985.

———, Understanding Fiction: Poems, 1986–1996, Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

For Further Study

Broughton, Irv, ed., The Writer’s Mind: Interviews with American Authors, University of Arkansas Press, 1990.

Broughton interviews a number of American authors, both poets and fiction writers, including Paul Zimmer, Colleen McElroy, and Fred Chappell. He also interviews Henry Taylor, who talks about his childhood and those who influenced his writing.

Jarman, Mark, and David Mason, eds., Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, Story Line Press, 1996.

Rebel Angels is an anthology presenting poets aligned with or sympathetic to New Formalism, a movement in American poetry reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in innovative ways.

Wright, Stuart, “Henry Taylor: A Bibliographic Chronicle, 1961-1987,” Bulletin of Bibilography, Vol. 45, No. 3, 1988, pp. 79-91.

Wright provides a thorough checklist of work published by Taylor from 1961-1987, including poems which have yet to appear in a collection. A short critical introduction accompanies the bibliography.

Poetry for Students