194 Poetry for Students
explores the psychological implications in Henry
Taylor’s poem and argues that Taylor uses the de-
tails of his homeland as a backdrop to more inter-
nal meditations.“Landscape with Tractor” is one of the most
memorable poems in The Flying Change.It reveals,
as many of Tayor’s poems do, the poet’s con-
sciousness of the rift between the idyllic surface of
the country landscape and the darker and more vi-
olent essence sometimes contained within that
landscape and sometimes brought out from the city
and dumped there. Despite the harsh aspects of the
story told by “Landscape with Tractor,” the poem
does not simply imply that the picturesque coun-
tryside has been invaded by the horrors of the more
“civilized” world. The speaker’s more comprehen-
sive realization is that humans must first learn to
carry and then somehow bear all their eyes take in.
Thus, there are psychological implications inherent
in this poem implications about the enduring na-
ture of experience and memory and about how each
might work to inform, instruct, and appall the hu-
man psyche.
“Landscape with Tractor” is a fairly straight-
forward narrative poem. It tells a story in the pre-
sent tense about a day at some point in the speaker’s
past when he comes across the dead body of a
“well-dressed black woman” in a field, that,
“bounded / by road, drive way, and vegetable gar-
den,” he often mowed with his tractor. In addition
to relating the gruesome details of his discovery,
saying that “Two local doctors use pitchforks / To
turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening,”the speaker also expresses his initial reaction to it.
He says that “the field tilts, whirls, then steadies as
[he] runs,” and that the next day “bluebottle files
are still swirling.” These details work to reveal that
the experience the speaker is relating is in fact an
authentic one there are no flights of imagination
here, no make-believe murder-mystery or pretend
foul-play. The poem then leaps to the speaker’s re-
alization that the dead woman’s body will stay with
him forever; the experience, he understands, has
become a constant part of him, a knowledge and
weight he must bear, as he says, to his own death.
“Landscape with Tractor” is filled with a range
of glorious tensions. Although his work in forms
can place Taylor among the contemporary Ameri-
can poets associating themselves with what is
called The New Formalism, such a placement
would be dreadfully reductive. Taylor, unlike some
of the poets associated with this movement, is not
merely concerned with the political and/or reac-
tionary act of reviving traditional poetic forms.
Rather, he is interested in exploring all possible
methods for expressing his take on the human ad-
venture, a project which sometimes leads him to
marry both traditional and less well-known forms.
The effect is a well-crafted tonal strain that is orig-
inal and haunting.
“Landscape with Tractor” is written in well-
controlled quatrains, or four-line-stanzas. The reg-
ularity of Taylor’s line and the order of his stanzas
produces a tone of reserve; it is what American poet
and critic Richard Dillard calls a “well-modulated
voice.” But the speaker’s use of slang (as in “Peo-
ple / Will toss all kinds of crap from their cars”) as
well as his use of a whole variety of idiomatic ex-
pressions (as in “it’s a clothing-store dummy, for
God’s sake”) produces a tension that makes the
speaker’s voice at once intimate and aloof. Thus,
the speaker achieves, by way of his tone, the sto-
ryteller’s authority, which comes in part from his
ability to appear to stand back from the events he
is narrating. He also attains the poet’s authority,
which comes from his ability to use any means nec-
essary in this case narrative suspense, exacting de-
tails, heightened diction, a relatively consistent
rhythm, and a final and surprising turn inward in
order to express outrage and sorrow.
The speaker’s use of the second person, be-
cause it contains the power of direct address and
approximates the pitches of everyday conversation,
also helps him to achieve a tone of intimacy:
How would it be if you took yourself off
To a house set well back from a dirt road,Landscape with Tractor... as the study of
any number of writers who
take a significant interest
in the details of their own
homelands will tell us,
human universals always
rise from specific details the
color of the mountain and
the odd, cool texture of the
fishing stream.”