Philip Larkin’s “The Mower” as a Curtal Sonnet

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Notes

1. If we scan the whole poem, we’ll find the first ten lines have a number of syllables varying between 8 and 12, with four to five stresses per line, whereas the last line has only 5 syllables and 2/3 stresses (“While” can be either stressed or unstressed).

2. Patrick Gill provides the most comprehensive study of Larkin’s sonnets (as many as 32, only 13 published in his life time) (83-96), yet fails to recognize “The Mower” as another variant of the standard sonnet. Tom Cook comes close by calling the poem a truncated sonnet without mentioning Hopkins (2014). But in modern critical terminology, a truncated sonnet is a general term referring to any variant of sonnet, which can be 14 lines, but fall short of 10 syllables per line, such as Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Sonnet” (Tyler 228), or less than 14 lines, such as the 10-line stanza form in John Keats’ odes (Wagner 108), Shakespeare’s 12-line Sonnet 136(Burrow 113) or Emerson’s famous 11-line poem “Days” (Buell 111). But different from “Days” which is written as a single stanza with 10 syllables (largely iambic pentameter) for each line and frequent use of assonance/consonance at the end of each line, “The Mower” has altogether no discernible rhyme or consistent meter throughout, with the last two lines all the more irregular in sound and shape. Therefore, in terms of architectural design, “The Mower” resembles far more closely Hopkins’ curtal sonnets than Emerson’s “Days..”

3. The preface was written in 1883. Later Hopkins wrote the third and last curtal sonnet “Ashboughs.” “Peace” and “Ashbough” are both written in Alexandrine(six-foot) lines, whereas “Pied Beauty,” the most famous, is written largely in five-foot lines.

4. James Booth claims “The chilling absence of rhyme seems to imply a self-inflicted penance” (12), but he fails to heed the assonance of the final two lines. It’s interesting to note that “The Explosion,” another elegy (this time on coal miners), is also written in non-rhyming triplets, yet with an independent one-line stanza.