Philip Larkin

Cut Grass

Cut Grass - meaning Summary

Ephemeral Summer Life

The poem observes freshly cut grass as a fragile, short-lived presence and uses summer imagery to extend that sense of fleeting life. Ordinary white blooms, hedgerows, and a slow-moving cloud create a quiet tableau in which the act of dying is natural, pervasive, and almost ceremonial. The tone is sobriety rather than drama: small, bright things perish quickly, bathing the scene in a calm, elegiac stillness.

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Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer's pace.

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