speaking of harmony, & Larkin, this Larkin poem was quoted by James Wood in latest New Yorker, in his very fine, beautiful review of Adam Nicolson's new book on the making of the King James Bible, God's Secretaries:


CUT GRASS


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.



Wood's review is a mini-tour of English literary tradition, showing how influential was the music of the King James Bible. I hear Whitman too in these lines, another offshoot of Biblical music. (& had stopped to notice a white lilac earlier in the day)

I like the quietude of this elegiac mowing.