Volume 10 183
Poem Summary
Stanza 1:
The title of the poem “Landscape with Trac-
tor” suggests that the composition will be descrip-
tive. Titles with “Landscape” in them are more pop-
ular 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 pas-
toral 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 address-
ing 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 him-
self 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 land-
scape 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 Tay-
lor uses various poetic devices, including allitera-
tion (“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 em-
bodied.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 anticipa-
tion. 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 Tay-
lor 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.” ofLandscape with Tractor