184 Poetry for Students
the third line underscore the breathlessness of the
speaker, and his description of the doctors turning
over the body with pitchforks shows us the narra-
tor’s disgust with the scene.
Stanza 7:
The description reads almost like a crime re-
port. We are provided with more details of the
corpse’s identity, although no name is attached.
The parallelism of the last two sentences empha-
sizes the speaker’s reaction to the body. His rou-
tine is interrupted, and he stops work for the day.
Stanza 8
Rather than telling readers how he has been af-
fected, the speaker shows the effect through im-
agery. 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 rou-
tine 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 mys-
tery.” In this stanza the woman’s life isa mystery.
Her identity remains unknown. This stanza begins
a series where sentences run over into the next
stanza, creating a rhythmic urgency that will con-
tinue until the end of the poem.
Stanzas 10-12
The fleetingness of life and identity is ad-
dressed. The speaker asks a rhetorical question, ad-
dressed 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 rou-
tine, especially when he is reminded of it on a reg-
ular 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 de-
composition on her body. His obsession with the
woman grows, and the poem’s ends with his real-
ization, 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 ex-
istence, boundaries which demarcate his life and ac-
tivities. This orderliness is also underscored through
the speaker’s capacity to do his work without really
thinking about it, “with half your mind / On some-
thing you’d rather be doing, or did once.” This do-
ing without thinking is also evident when he first
sees an object in his field and thinks it’s a man-
nequin. 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 experi-
ences, 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 iden-
tity 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
Landscape with Tractor
Media
Adaptations
- Watrershed Tapes distributes Taylor’s 1985 au-
diocassette, Landscape with Tractor. Watershed
Tapes can be ordered online at http://www.wa-
tershed.winnipeg.mb.ca/
