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He is "known through" his literal marks upon the landscape, "literal" here referring not only to the tangible form of the markings, but also to their resemblance to letters. Like letters spelling Damon's name in his own hand, the cut stalks of a mown meadow signify the mower as well as the fact that his power to inscribe his identity makes him fundamentally literate. Damon's literate, and therefore complex identity, complicates our perception of the pastoral subject's simplicity. The Empsonian pastoral project of judging the "refined thing" by the "fundamental thing" (19) requires in Marvell's version of pastoral a primary revision of his complex "humble thing," Damon, as a genuinely simple "humble thing."
Damon's identity forms, thematically and structurally, the central problem of "Damon the Mower." The fifth of eleven stanzas:
'How long wilt thou, fair shepherdess,
Esteem me, and my presents less?
To thee the harmless snake I bring,'
Disarmed of its teeth and sting;
To thee chameleons, changing hue,
And oak leaves tipped with honey dew.
Yet thou, ungrateful, hast not sought
Nor what they are, nor who them brought.
focusses on Damon's "presents," making a riddle of what has already been answered--"what they are" and "who them brought," the solution to which can be traced to the re-present-ation of Damon within the gifts. Damon's "presents," that is, give away his identity, in the double sense of sacrifice and revelation, and if we are to answer the riddle of Damon's identity we should examine what kind of "presents" he gives away.
The gifts--a "harmless snake...chameleons...oak leaves tipped with honey dew"--move, metaphorically, from diminished impotence through change to an harmonic union within nature. I mean to argue that this progression reproduces Damon's development from impotent, "disarmed," diminishment in stanzas 1-4 to a potent union with nature's "sweet" dews in stanzas 6-8, by giving away his chameleon-like identity in stanza 5. If we examine the exchange of presents in stanza 5, we discover the larger change. "Chameleons," the second and central gift, allows the first gift to change to the third. The first gift, "the harmless snake...\Disarmed of its teeth and sting," reflects Damon's impotent, humble identity in stanzas 1-4, where Damon is powerless to find "relief" or "esteem." And the third gift, "oak leaves tipped with honey dew," suggests the Damon of stanzas 6-8, integrated into Nature's potent moistures.
Damon's presents then point toward an exchange from his "harmless" persona for a more powerful, unified one. But the engagement with change incapacitates any certainty of retaining the powerful identity; exchange works in two directions. In fact, the snake and the oak leaves both imply their opposites. Damon's "disarmed" snake of stanza 5 remembers as it revises Juliana's stinging indifference (1), a snake that "once kept within, now glitters in its second skin" (2). Damon's "harmless" humble character appears, snake-like, to cover a second skin. Similarly, Damon's "oak leaves tipped with honey dew" recall while opposing the parched landscape of stanzas 1-4. In the system of exchange there is always a "second skin." Damon's presents give away his identity as double, revealing him as complex in the Empsonian opposition of "complex" and "simple." Those presents also give away, in the sense of sacrifice, that complexity, which appears to be intolerable to both Damon and Marvell. For Damon, his second skin is the source of his complaint:
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