Poetry for Students Vol. 10

188 Poetry for Students

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, un-

focused, 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 mow-

ing 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 peo-

ple in particular. These images are rooted in gen-

eralizations 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 un-

derscores the speaker’s irateness of having his rou-

tine interrupted and of people in general. It sug-

gests 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 in-

terruption 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 men-

tioned, 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 re-

minded of her by “the damp dent in the tall grass/

where bluebottle flies are still swirling.” The mys-

tery 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 in-

trusion 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 engulf-

ing 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 con-

sciousness. The more he questions, however, the

deeper the mystery. When the speaker initially en-

counters the woman he doesn’t even recognize her

Landscape with Tractor

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.”