Landscape with Tractor
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 be-
ings 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 in-
trospective speaker describes a scenario in which
he discovers the body of a woman while mowing
his field. The speaker is changed forever by the ex-
perience 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 in-
terrupted as well as frustration at what the event
will mean to his life. The landscape is both physi-
cal (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.
Henry Taylor
1983
Volume 10 181