Volume 10 189

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
mindandin 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, be-
trayal, / or innocent refusal, brought her here.” The
speaker elaborates on the kind of presence by list-
ing possible reasons for her death. The only spe-
cific reason in the list is the “dope deal,” which re-
verberates 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 in-
ability 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 par-
adise, 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 Stu-
dents,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(Uni-
versity Press of New England), Roads Not Taken:
Rereading Robert Frost(University of Missouri
Press) as well as a forthcoming collection of es-
says on the poetic movement, New Formalism.Be-
ginning 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 deter-
mining characteristic of people, the poem instead

reveals the problematic thoughts and guilty associ-

ations 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 gen-

res, 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, shep-

herds or, in this case, farmers. In the conventional

pastoral poem, the shepherd meditates on the rela-

tionship between nature and the city. Usually, these

meditations lead to speculations and critiques of

various social institutions: the best most represen-

tative example of such pastorals are Virgil’s

Eclogues.Indeed, it is just such Eclogues that Tay-

lor 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 con-

ventions of a rural man who depicts social institu-

tions 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

Landscape with Tractor

What

Do I Read

Next?

• “Landscape with Tractor” is included in Tay-
  lor’s Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, The Fly-
  ing 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 Ameri-
  can 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 Windowmagazine. Taylor dis-
  cusses his own approach towards writing and his
  thoughts on contemporary poetry.