18 pages • 36 minutes read
Mowing
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Background
Literary Context
Limón is known for writing poems that examine human being’s relationship to the natural world. Specifically, she examines desire, the transitory nature of contentment, the fragility and power of life on Earth, and a reverence for plants and animals. Limón’s poems are often short, fitting onto one page, and use common language to transform animals and plants into metaphors for aspects of the speaker’s own personality. “Mowing” is characteristic of her themes and style. It is both self-reflective and self-mocking, examining her connection and disconnection from the natural world.
Limón acknowledges that most of her poems are autobiographical, and the speaker is very closely connected to her. “Mowing” appears in Limón’s fourth collection of poetry, which she wrote shortly after moving from Brooklyn to Kentucky to live with her husband, who raises horses. In multiple interviews Limón discusses the way her changing life circumstances informed the book. In addition to exploring her connection to a new landscape, Limón was also in the process of grieving the loss of her stepmother, who had died of cancer. Though mowing meditates on the difference between the “savage” wildness of nature and the peace of doing yard work, other poems in this collection more directly tackle heavier themes of death, feminism, race and culture, and destruction of the natural world.
The collection opens with a quote from Larry Levis’ poem “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand”: “Who among the numberless you have become desires this moment // Which comprehends nothing more than loss & fragility & the fleeing of flesh?” The collection explores what it means to be a human being, full of desires and also faced with mortality. Many of the poems in the book explore and describe the landscape around her, as exemplified in “mowing,” while also expressing sadness at her own sense of loss. Many of the poems in Bright Dead Things are about her stepmother’s death from cancer. She connects human loss to the fragility of the natural world. The poem that gives Limón’s book its title, “I Remember the Carrots”, refers to the time when the speaker was a child and picked the carrots out of her father’s garden before they were ripe. She carried them to the house, proud of her “bright, dead things” and was scolded. But years later she says she envied the field “its contentment” and says she wants to pick the carrots again, to kill them “because I know I can.”
The book as a whole does not merely admonish readers to be gentler with the natural world but rather explores, with honesty, all aspects of the human condition. In her poem, “I Remember the Carrots” Limón’s speaker often admits her own shortcomings, at the same time that she expresses her desire to be a better person. As she describes in “Mowing” she is more “crow” (Line 13) than she is “white pine” (Line 13). Compared to the serenity and silence of something like a pine tree or a field, she looks “clumsy and loud” (Line 13). Nature shows her how beautiful and peaceful life can be and throws her own restlessness and propensity for destruction into high relief. At the same time the power of the natural world makes her feel she too is powerful, as in the poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” in which the speaker compares herself to the “lady horses” who know they are “going to come in first” in the horse races. In them she sees her own power combined with her femininity, creating a distinct visual metaphor for female empowerment.
The honesty and breadth of Limón’s work, encapsulating so many rich human emotions, is part of what makes her a popular poet. When she asserts that people should revere nature and aim for a peaceful life—more pine than crow, she is quick to point out her own challenges in achieving these goals. Her work explores ways that people resist being content and happy with what they have, of always wanting something else. This prevents her work from sounding moralistic or accusatory and allows her to look honestly at the difficulty humans have in achieving their idealized selves.
Romanticism and Eco-Feminism
“Mowing” explores the connection between the natural world and the inner world of the speaker. This theme is at the center of the school of the Romantic poets. Romanticism is a literary philosophy that was founded by William Wordsworth with the publication of Preface to the Lyrical Ballads in 1801 and 1802. Wordsworth lamented that increased urbanization and reliance on technology was blunting human imagination, our connection with nature, and the ability to feel authentic emotions. He used poetry to explore the way nature could shape the human mind, stimulate the imagination, and bring balm to the soul. Wordsworth and his colleague Samuel Taylor Coleridge were prominent Romantic poets before the turn of the century. In the United States, Romanticism took root with poets like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Wadsworth, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Centuries later, poets continue to explore the connection between exposure to nature and the growth of our spiritual being.
Ecofeminist poetry emerged as an offshoot to Romanticism from mostly female writers such as Anna Kingsford, Clarissa Estes, and Carol Lee Sanchez. Like the Romantics, ecofeminists value the natural world and see it as a refuge for the psyche and a stimulant for the imagination. Ecofeminists also advocate for a shift in the philosophy of nations and economies to reflect a greater respect for nature, treating nature as an entity with its own needs that should be honored and appreciated, rather than exploited and dominated for monetary gain. It is termed “feminist” because ecofeminism holds that women have a more wholistic approach to building communities and economies, working with those around them to cultivate potential, share resources, build alliances, and develop individuals. Ecofeminism advocates for this wholistic approach on a global scale, but ecofeminist poetry demonstrates this attitude in the way that poets address nature, even in personal moments.
Ada Limón’s poetry embodies these ecofeminist tendencies through empathy for both natural forces and humanity. In “Mowing”, rather than judge her neighbor for mowing circles around so many trees, she wonders if he likes doing it, which implies a tender regard for this stranger. The speaker’s idealization of staying “hidden” from interaction underlines a philosophy of allowance. She does not propose to manage nature or exploit it but instead to observe it and become part of it. She says she wishes to be a tree, a “cool white pine” (Line 13) which would allow her to be part of the natural world without controlling it.
Limón also does not judge her neighbor for making a profit off of nature. He owns a tree farm, and she imagines he must like mowing circles around his 10,000 trees. This poses a harmonious relationship between humans and the natural world. The man across the street tends to nature, demonstrating his care and appreciation. Nature, in turn, provides him with something to sell that helps him thrive. This is an ecofeminist attitude of cultivation and interdependence.
A neglect of the plants would let the grasses grow to unruly levels, making them “savage” (Line 15). The word has a negative connotation—violent and dangerous—but there is also the sense of something untamed, wild, and exciting. Savage can be a state of liberation from imposed regimentation. Limón suggests that it is “hard not to always want something else” (Line 14), to allow that kind of savage wildness to take over and not to want to change it into something else. Perhaps this too is a way of investigating a “feminine” desire to cultivate and tend to nature, making it more civilized than it would be in its natural state. Still, that cultivation is respectful, shaping the grass rather than killing it, tending to the trees as a way of connecting and enjoying being in nature, working with nature to co-create something beautiful and beneficial to humans.
Whereas earlier Romantic poets were openly theistic, Limón expresses her skepticism about God. It’s a trait that defines more modern Romantic poets, some of whom reflect a growing trend away from organized religion and towards agnosticism, church-free spirituality, or atheism. Her poems suggest a reverence and communion with nature as a stand-in for structured religion, in which nature itself is a reflection of the divine. In an interview with Sarah Green, Limón says she doesn’t believe in God, but she “does believe in animals.” In “The Wild Divine”, another poem from Bright Dead Things, she describes a horse as being “almost worthy of complete devotion” and ends with the lines:
I thought, this was what it was to be blessed—
to know a love that was beyond an owning, beyond
the body and its needs, but went straight from wild
thing to wild thing, approving of its wildness (Limón, Ada. “The Wild Divine.” 2015. Connotation Press.).
For Limón, as for many of the Romantics, nature becomes a stand-in or vehicle for connecting with something larger, whether attributing it to a classical or atheistic concept of “divine.” This attitude of treating nature with reverence instead of finding ways to exploit it is at the center of the ecofeminist movement.
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By Ada Limón
