Mowers and the Birds they Kill
The central episode of this poem, the slaughter of the lark’s offspring by a careless and then malicious mower, finds an analogue in Andrew Marvell’s episode of the mower in “Upon Appleton House.” Marvell’s collected poems were not printed until 1681, after his death, but his poems did circulate in manuscript, and so there is the possibility that Pulter knew this poem. In Marvell’s poem, the episode in which a mower unwittingly kills a rail (a bird found typically in dense vegetation) is treated more sympathetically than it is in Pulter’s poem. The mower is given more dignity by Marvell and he laments his mistake (though the female character Thestylis exults in the kill and means to eat it). The lament of the rail’s parents is mentioned, but the end of the episode shows the country folk celebrating after their work is done.
Upon Appleton House, lines 385-432
- 49
- No Scene that turns with Engines strange
- Does oftener than these meadows change.
- For when the sun the grass hath vexed,
- The tawny mowers enter next;
- Who seem like Israelites to be,
- Walking on foot through a green sea.
- To them the grassy deeps divide,
- And crowd a lane to either side.
- 50
- With whistling scythe, and elbow strong,
- These massacre the grass along:
- While one, unknowing carves the rail,
- Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail.
- The edge all bloody from its breast
- He draws, and does his stroke detest,
- Fearing the flesh untimely mowed
- To him a fate as black forebode.
- 51
- But bloody Thestylis, that waits
- To bring the mowing camp their cates,
- Greedy as kites has trussed it up,
- And forthwith means on it to sup:
- When on another quick she lights,
- And cries, “He called us Israelites;
- But now, to make his saying true,
- Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew.”
- 52
- Unhappy birds! what does it boot
- To build below the grass’s root;
- When lowness is unsafe as height,
- And chance o’ertakes what ’scapeth spite?
- And now your orphan parents’ call
- Sounds your untimely Funeral.
- Death-trumpets creak in such a note,
- And ’tis the Sourdine in their throat.
- 53
- Or sooner hatch or higher build:
- The Mower now commands the Field,
- In whose new traverse seemeth wrought
- A camp of battle newly fought:
- Where, as the meads with hay, the plain
- Lies quilted o’er with bodies slain:
- The women that with forks it fling,
- Do represent the pillaging.
- 54
- And now the careless victors play,
- Dancing the triumphs of the hay;
- Where every mower’s wholesome heat
- Smells like an Alexander’s sweat.
- Their females fragrant as the mead
- Which they in Fairy Circles tread:
- What at their dance’s end they kiss,
- Their new-made hay not sweeter is.