18 pages • 36 minutes read
Mowing
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Themes
Control and Chaos
On the surface, “Mowing” may be about a woman watching a man cut grass, but these are emblems of how he tries to control the nature of the world and the way the woman tries to control her inner nature. As her neighbor succeeds in tidying the grass, the speaker concludes she cannot fully control her mind. Her inner nature, meaning her mental activity, parallels the outer activity of the man mowing the lawn. Both move in circles, the man circling the trees, the speaker using repeating phrases to circle around certain ideas.
“Mowing” incorporates qualities of traditional meditative practices, including repetition, attention to an image or focal point, self-reflection, and self-awareness. It is replete with images that connote meditation, specifically circles: evening, stillness, and the desire to “disappear” (Line 10). Practitioners of meditation focus the mind on a single point to reduce thinking. By reducing identification with one’s thoughts, you can “disappear” from the world and from the ego.
Limón holds this space of peace against its corollary—the state of wanting. Merely wishing to be a tree instead of a crow is to recognize that human nature will always want something else. Paradoxically, as the speaker tells the reader that she wants to be invisible, she also achieves this goal, at least on a surface level. She is in fact hidden—apparently observing the man unseen. Yet, even though she is physically still, mentally she is quite active, describing the man, wondering why he mows the lawn, looking for birds, wondering where they are, then comparing herself to them, then criticizing herself for always wanting.
Inner Nature vs. Outer Nature
The word “savage” (Line 15) in the final line of “Mowing” is unexpected and important. It suggests that when things are not controlled, when people do not want to control, or alter what they see, what comes naturally emerges as savage. This suggests a paradox. Constantly wanting something else is uncomfortable for the speaker, but not wanting anything would result in a lack of human activity, and hence the grass would become savage. If nature is not tamed, it may become savage to humans. If thoughts are not tamed, they can become savage as well. The speaker demonstrates this when she lets the reader hear her self-talk. She compares herself to a crow who is “clumsy and loud” (Line 13). This demonstrates both how the speaker’s thinking is savage and full of self-judgment and how the speaker, in social situations, is naturally loud and clumsy. It suggests something that needs to be tamed, like a pine, like the trees that are being carefully tended in front of her. This is why the man in front of her enjoys mowing, because he is following his natural tendency to control the world around him, to want something different and then make it happen. He is tending something and preventing it from becoming savage. It is a paradox too, that he must work in order to make nature bend to his will, but in that struggle he finds the enjoyment of a hypnotic activity that allow him to disappear and forget himself in service to something else.
The speaker uses the image of what is happening in the outer world to reflect on what is happening in her inner world. The mowing of the grass becomes an emblem of tending to the “savage” wandering of the human mind. While the man on the mower can use his machine to control the way the outer world looks, the speaker on the balcony cannot so easily control what her own mind does.
Self-Effacement and Surrender
When the speaker states directly that her desire to hide is not about sadness, the reader must consider other connotations of disappearing. One can disappear out of fear or shame, however in the context of this poem, it means living untroubled by how the world sees you. The speaker is participating in the life of her neighborhood from afar where she will not be noticed or asked to interact. This correlates with how practitioners of meditation train their mind to observe dispassionately, gaining distance from emotion or a desire to react. The reader can see the benefits the speaker gains from this stillness, this practice of quietly and unobtrusively observing her neighbor. As the poem unfolds she becomes more still, more self-reflective, more self-effacing. At the same time, she also expresses the paradox of this practice, that as she tries to be still, her mind becomes more restless, hence the ultimate conclusion that this attempt to control the mind is difficult.
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By Ada Limón
