The stupid fishes hang, as plain
As flies in crystal overta'en,
Or of the hayfield roughly mown, into which the herd has been turned to graze:
And what below the scythe increast,
Is pinched yet nearer by the beast.
The mower's work, begun and ended with the dews, in all its charming monotony, seems to have had a peculiar attraction for Marvell; he recurs to it in more than one poem.
I am the mower Damon, known
Through all the meadows I have mown;
On me the morn her dew distils
Before her darling daffodils.
And again, of the mowers,
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.
The aspects of the country on which he dwells with deepest pleasure—and here lies the charm—are not those of Nature in her sublimer or more elated moods, but the gentler and more pastoral elements, that are apt to pass unnoticed at the time by all but the true lovers of the quiet country side, and crowd in upon the mind when surfeited by the wilder glories of peak and precipice, or where tropical luxuriance side by side with tropical aridity blinds and depresses the sense, with the feeling that made Browning cry from Florence,
Oh, to be in England, now that April's there!
Marvell's lines, "On the Hill and Grove at Billborow," are an instance of this; there is a certain fantastic craving after antithesis and strangeness, it is true, but the spirit underlies the lines. The poem however must be read in its entirety to gain the exact impression.