Odds and Ends
April Mortality: A Study of Augie March’s ‘The Good Gardener (On How He Fell)’ Part 2
Featuring: Augie March
Written by: Aurora Moore
Published: Jul 16th '10
Continued from Part 1...
The gardener may be interpreted three-fold: literally, as someone whose job is to tend the lover's garden, and with whom housewives stereotypically cheat on their husbands; as a lover with the extended metaphor of the garden as the womb, and the gardener as he who fertilises and brings forth life in the woman; and as mythological reference to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden from the Book of Genesis. This last meaning carries a couple meanings itself.
The first, in reference to the parenthetical title "On How He Fell", alludes to The Fall of Man. Before Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, mankind was made by God to live forever; as a consequence of his Fall he become mortal.
Conversely, procreation has long been poetically regarded as the means to a kind of immortality in the form of one's descendants. Notably, the first 17 of William Shakespeare's sonnets, sometimes referred to as "the procreation sonnets", are written to a young man, encouraging him to marry and propagate so that he may defy time and death, with his beauty living on in his children. Thus, an abortion may be seen as a nipping of such a bud, the opportunity to attain something eternal wasted, and is therefore the gardener's Fall, his seed being "cast out" of the woman's womb, his immortality seized.
Lacking the structure of a common pop song, it may be divided into four parts for the purpose of understanding its narrative technique. The first part consists of lines 1-8. The song sets its mood immediately with its unsettling guitar picking: F# B A# B A B A# B. Built on the second degree of the key of E, we do not hear the chord, which would have consisted of F# A C#, but a tritone (F#-B) and a minor second (A#-B), the two most harshly dissonant intervals in Western music.
1 Here sits a once good gardener, pale as a shadow of a doubt,
2 Once a happy dweller of a garden good, once a sleepy sinner, once cast out
3 To the sea where the crossy-eyed maids murmur low, "do you see, do you see where the doubts cross his shadow?"
4 Drowned and amoral, I pollinate the coral and reek of the deep where I've tended the water weed -
5 I was once your good gardener, sing to bring on Spring,
6 I know where your good grass grows,
7 I know what your boyfriend knows,
8 I was your good gardener.
The first line introduces the gardener to the listener – one can almost imagine his despairingly slumped shoulders and quivering lip. The gardener's once characteristic goodness may be interpreted in terms of simple efficiency, but it also recalls Plato's notion of the Good, from which comes justice, beauty, truth, among other things. Plato saw the sun as a metaphor for The Form of the Good, and like the gardener is to the garden and to the woman, the sun is the source of life, providing "generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation" (1).
Described as "pale as a shadow of a doubt", his appearance hints at uncertainty and unease. A shadow, like a child, may be seen as an extension of oneself. The gardener's likening to a shadow is also in opposition to a comparison to the sun. Shadows are by nature not pale, so the justification for the word's inclusion must be found elsewhere. Pale comes to us from the Latin pallere, "to be pale". Pallere is also the root of the word "fallow", which has one definition as land that is ploughed but unseeded -- not producing life.
The first eight lines introduce the gardener's outcome while still leaving the listener unaware of the events that led to the ending. In the present tense, it refers to the woman's pregnancy and abortion strictly in figurative language -- the garden is both symbol and metaphor. The acoustic guitar is the only instrument heard (excluding the click track in the background).
The first two lines give the song's allusion to the Garden of Eden its second meaning: as a creation myth, comparing the creation of a child to the creation of mankind. Numerous creation myths of the world involve a birth, and a mother and a father.
Lines 3-4 contain another common element of creation folklore, as the gardener is cast out into the sea. Creation myths from almost every ancient culture involve a sea; the theory of evolution proposes that all life evolved from one. This primordial sea will return and bookend the song, and is a key symbol in it, second only to the garden. In literature and poetry, the sea has traditionally been a symbol of birth, the mother, death, and eternity and absoluteness, all of which are present in the song.
Underwater and in exile, our gardener poetically finds the work he no longer could in the garden. He pollinates the coral and the "water weed" marine flora; it is as if he will scour the earth to fertilise anything he can find, if only in imagination. These two lines are worded in a way that evokes sex. The unrealistic nature and the abrupt appearance of the gardener under the sea suggests this may be taking place only in his mind, or perhaps is the songwriter, as the creator of the gardener’s life, subtly acknowledging his own presence, if not lending his creative nature to his character. It also prompts a comparison of creating a life to creating a song.
The theme of work and the blurring of the line between the songwriter and his character continues in the next line, "I was your good gardener, sing to bring on Spring", the first line of the section closest to resembling a refrain. The verb chosen to convey this work of the gardener bringing forth life is "sing", reinforcing the idea of a song-work metaphor; this self-reference of the song is a motif in Sunset Studies.
This line also mentions the season perennially associated with fertility and the arrival of new life. The seasons in traditional poetry are capitalised when personified, and Spring is truly personified in ‘The Good Gardener’: it is a child.
"I know what your boyfriend knows" possibly hints at the previously mentioned illicit gardener's stereotype. After a short trumpet solo, lines 9-16 find the addition of light percussion and a doubled and harmonised vocal track as the lyrics switch to the past tense in order to narrate the events leading to the abortion, as the curtain of poetic language slowly draws back and we begin to see the first hints of literalism.
Continue reading Part 3 of "April Morality..."
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