152THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRYhas a poem about mowing (the sonnet “Mower”), though his speaker is
actually meditating on the beauty of the labor of using a scythe. Larkin
de-idealizes this erstwhile pastoral trope even further: the mower is
now the machine, pushed along mindlessly by the speaker. It stalls
twice as it fails to cut up the hedgehog (a creature about the size of a
squirrel), suggesting that the mower’s pusher, the speaker (also a mower,
of course), failed to notice the damage he was causing until he paused
to inspect the machine. Being aware of the history of mowing poems
helps one to see that the mower and mowing are symbolic of humanity’s
changing relationship with the natural world. The machinery and the
system it helps to create (mowed lawns, suburban houses, consumer-
ism, etc.) reduce us to passive and unthinking mowers. We cut grass not
knowing the worlds we alter and destroy. These things are implied by
the poem, but what is explicit is the death of the single animal, the one
the speaker has observed before and, like Dickinson’s feeder of birds,
has reached out to. This is not a pet but still a kind of companion, a
creature with whom we share some fundamental quality of being. The
creature is barely known, but its death and the speaker’s responsibility
for it create an absence, a sense of loss. What the poem makes explicit is
that the death of an animal can be felt and articulated as equivalent to
the loss of a human life. “Next morning, I got up and it did not” rings with
the same existential truth as Wordsworth’s “No motion has she now, no
force.” The next line is wonderfully paradoxical: “The first day after a
death, the new absence / Is always the same” suggests at once the perma-
nence of death and that on subsequent days, we forget. The moment is
only kept forceful in the language of poetry.
Elegies for dead animals are surprisingly numerous though not
widely written about.^54 I think this is in part because criticism is slightly
embarrassed by these too-sincere and revealing poems. Grief over the
death of pets is always an awkward topic—we know it is sincere and
deeply felt but also feel that such sadness is somehow misplaced, since a
pet is “only an animal.” Good poems about dead pets are hard to write:
How does one make private grief public? How does one do so while avoid-
ing cliché and sticky sentiment? Honoring a life and death always means
finding the right words, good words, and in this, as with all poetry, it is