Last week I was lucky enough to have a few days’ stay with my daughter in Newcastle. We visited the Picture a Poet exhibition on tour at the Sunderland Museum from the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition featured photo portraits of famous British poets. In addition, students from Sunderland University had done a photoshoot of poets from the North East. My daughter was one of the poets!
She had recently been given by another writer friend an anthology of poems entitled Being Human and she showed me this little poem in it, which I found very moving. I hope you will too.
The Mower by Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
The poet’s secretary and one-time lover, Betty Mackereth recalled his grief over the incident.
She said, “I remember too well Philip telling me of the death of the hedgehog: it was in his office the following morning with tears streaming down his face.”
But Mr Larkin had not always set such a high value on another’s life or grieved its passing. Author
Maeve Brennan recalled a shocking occasion when the poet had driven his car straight at a hedgehog and deliberately killed it.
What was it that changed the heart of this man?
The only difference I can see between the hedgehog callously wiped out on the road, and the hedgehog in the garden is personal acquaintance.
The first hedgehog was, to the poet, nameless and faceless, one of a numberless multitude.
But the second, the poet had come to know. He’d seen her before, maybe hibernating in a tightly curled prickly ball. Next time, the acquaintanceship went a stage further – he fed her and in doing so created a connection, a bond between the two of them.
Now they had a real relationship. Now ‘his’ hedgehog had become a person to him.
Getting to know this hedgehog, however slightly, opened Philip Larkin’s eyes to the proper worth of this little life. A life equal to his own.
If I had to pick out the two words from the poem which meant the most to me, I would choose, “each other”.
Those two words we normally take to mean other people, other humans. Or maybe not other people in general, but our own colleagues or classmates, our pub quiz team, our choir, our fellow club members. Or, closer to home still perhaps, our own family.
But in this piece of verse, the poet has loaded those two words with much weightier significance. “Each other” no longer means just those in his inner circle. It no longer means his fellow countrymen or women, nor even the human race at large. Mr Larkin’s “each other” reaches out to every creature on the planet with whom he and we are connected by the simple fact of our sharing in common
precious, fragile life.
“…..we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.”
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