This week is Andrew Motion’s last as the English Poet Laureate, a role he has filled for the past ten years. Though neither a much-loved mascot à la John Betjeman nor a tribal shaman à la Ted Hughes, he has almost certainly been the busiest Poet Laureate ever, becoming a self-appointed “ambassador for poetry” to the nation at large – or at least to large numbers of its schoolchildren, library-users and radio-listeners. The verse he has produced for royal occasions in the course of his tenure has met with mixed responses, but he has continued to write poems whose occasions are more purely personal as well, and “The Mower”, which was first published in the TLS on May 4, 2007, shows his characteristic tone and manner essentially unaffected by the demands of public office.

Motion is probably still best known as the subtle, moving elegist of his mother, who suffered a riding accident when he was a boy; "The Mower" is one of a more recent group of elegies for his father, here recalled with loving fidelity to detail and gentle comedy in one of the familiar rituals of English middle-class life. Only a certain precision and delicacy in the diction, and the occasional slight swelling of tension at line-endings, distinguish the poem from prose – but do so securely. Truth to memory of the repeated, unvarying event is the only ‘effect’ the poem reaches for, preparing in this way for the quietly visionary close and the sense of reality altered for ever. Here, it is only the ‘big green metal grass-basket’ that declares itself ‘By Royal Appointment’.

The Mower

With storm-light in the east but no rain yet
I came in from mowing my square of lawn
and paused in the doorway to glance around
at my handiwork and the feckless apple blossom

blurring those trim stripes and Hovver-sweeps
I had meant to last. What I saw instead was you
in threadbare cords, catching the sunny interval
between showers, trundling the Ransome out

from its corner in the woodshed. The dizzy whiff
of elm-chips and oil. Joke-shop spider-threads
greying the rubber handles. Gravel pips squeaking
as the roller squashed through the yard. Then a hush

like the pause before thunder while you performed
your ritual of muffled curses and forehead-wipes,
your tugs on the glistening string starter-cable,
more curses, more furious yanks, until at long last

the engine sulked, got over it, sighed a grey cloud
speckled with petrol-bits, and wobbled into a roar.
Off came the brake, and off charged the machine,
dragging you down to the blazing Tree of Heaven

at the garden end, where the trick was to reverse
without stalling or scraping a hefty mud-crescent,
before you careered back towards Kit and me
at our place in the kitchen window, out of your way.

To and fro, to and fro, to and fro, to and fro, to and fro,
and each time a few feet more to the left, sometimes
lifting one hand in a hasty wave which told us Stay
put, but also I'm in charge, although we understood

from the way your whole body lurched lopsided
on the turn this was less than a hundred percent true.
Getting the job finished was all we ever wanted,
parked with our cricket things and happy enough

to wait, since experience had taught us that after
you'd unhooked the big green metal grass-basket
splodged with its Royal Appointment transfer,
lugged it off to the smoking heap by the compost,

thumped it empty, then re-appeared to give us
the thumbs up, we were allowed to burst suddenly
out like dogs into the sweet air, measure the pitch
between our studious stump-plantings, toss to see

who went in first, then wait for you to turn up again
from the woodshed where you had taken five minutes
to wipe the blades down, and switch the petrol off,
and polish the grass-bucket although it never would

shine up much, being what you called venerable.
You always did come back, that was the thing.
As you also come back now in the week you died,
just missing the first thick gusts of rain and the last

of the giddy apple blossom falling into your footprints
with bright grass-flecks on your shoes and trouser-legs,
carefree for the minute, and young, and fit for life,
but cutting clean through me then vanishing for good.

ANDREW MOTION (2007)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "In the Raj" by C. H. Sisson, click here.

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