192 Poetry for Students
Ultimately, the fact that it is so difficult to de-
termine the exact meter of these lines tells us even
more about its theme: in America, when it comes
to race, nothing is simple, nothing is easily deci-
phered. To clue readers into the ambiguity of race
that this poem will explore, Taylor makes his own
meter fundamentally ambiguous as well.
Also, he is equally deceptive in his word
choice and language. The poem seems so simple,
there is virtually no need to look up any word in
the dictionary, for example. But this simple diction
is as ambiguous as the meter. For what seems to
be so straightforward is, in fact, a mystery so deep
that, by the end of the poem, no language can ad-
equately explain it.
Turning now to the poem itself one notices that
from the very first, Taylor invites us into his
speaker’s mind. We are not just a witness to what
he discovers, but we are also made to undergo the
same shock and moral crisis that he undergoes as
well. The poem begins:
How would it be if you took yourself off
To a house set well back from a dirt road,
With, say, three acres of grass bounded
By road, driveway, and vegetable garden?
In these lines the reader is offered an invita-
tion. Why not go to a pleasant three acre farm?
Small and compact it might offer an attractive meal
and a fine time of conversation and fun. Invited into
this farm, Taylor’s speaker then continues to ask
what the reader would do. In the second and third
stanza, he tells how the reader would mow the field.
He brings the reader into the visceral experience of
riding the “bushhog.” In the fourth stanza, after the
readers have been asked to become this farmer, he
introduces the gothic, grotesque element into the
poem. At first neither he nor first time readers know
what he’s talking about. The fourth stanza merely
tells that “we glimpse it.” The farmer’s first reac-
tion is, therefore, meant to be the same as the
reader’s, and then to think as he thinks: “People /
Will toss all kinds of crap from their cars.”
The first encounter with the corpse, then, is an-
noyance. Typical of pastoral poetry, the farmer sig-
nals his disgust with city folk who have no concern
for the fields that gives them the food they eat and
much of the clothes they wear. Angry that
passersby would throw “crap” from their cars, Tay-
lor’s speaker, in the next stanza, gets a closer look.
He thinks what he sees is “a clothing-store
dummy.” He cannot believe how rude, how amaz-
ingly weird, city folk are. That they would throw
a dummy on his field! Knowing, as the reader doesafter finishing the poem, however, that this is, in
fact, a dead woman, the initial response of Taylor’s
speaker is not only upsetting, but, because the body
is of a black woman, it is also potentially racist.
Blacks as mere property; blacks as mere dummies,
blacks as cast off goods. Are not these the same
sentiments that have had such a powerful and en-
during reality in the south? To this speaker’s hor-
ror, although he knows himself not to be racist, his
first reaction to the body was, in terms of race in
America, classically racist. At this point, guilt, al-
ways a moral emotion, enters into the poem. It ex-
plains why he had to make his readers literally
share in his experience as if it were happening to
them for the very first time. He needs his readers
to feel as he feels in order to prove that his first
thoughts about this woman are not racist thoughts.
Exactly half way through the poem, Taylor re-
alizes just what has been left on his field: “the field
tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run.” Here, Tay-
lor captures the delirium of his discovery. What fol-
lows likens the corpse to what, in her famous song,
Billie Holiday called, a strange fruit. The harvest
of this field is a “four days dead, and ripening”
“well-dressed black woman.” In the next stanza,
the reader learns that the cause of death is “no mys-
tery: two bullet holes / In the breast.”
But rather than enter into the experience or
imagined life of this woman, the poem then returns
its focus back to the speaker and away from the
woman. By returning to the speaker, the urgency of
the opening question, “How would it be?” becomes
all the more poignant and difficult. For now that the
reader has been invited into this man’s life the
reader must respond as he does to this discovery.
In the second half of the poem, the final six
stanzas, he reports his response as a psychological
and social dilemma, precisely the American
dilemma Gunner Myrdal wrote of in his famous
1944 report. In the ninth stanza, “weeks pass.”
Clearly still upset, the speaker seeks whatever news
he can find about the woman. At the post office,
he learns that she was brought out “from the city,
they guess, and dumped / like a bag of beer cans.”
Here the typical pastoral critique of the city joins
an endemic racism common to the rural south. In
the country, the white locals associate city folk with
a cold, dispassionate lack of concern even as they
are not surprised to see that black folk are no bet-
ter than garbage. Taylor’s speaker does not share
such racist views but he reports what he hears and
adds a wonderful enjambment that breaks his
thought not only across a line but over a stanza asLandscape with Tractor