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The circle around Damon suggested by the scythe's motion moves toward a self-reflexive closure for Damon's identity in stanza 8, even as it re-asserts his ever-present exchange of identities..
'Nor am I so deformed to sight,
If in my scythe I looked right;
In which I see my picture done,
As in a crescent moon the sun.
The deathless fairies take me oft
To lead them in their dances soft:
And, when I tune myself to sing,
About me they contract their ring.
Damon's reflection in his scythe sets up a perfect, complementarily whole identity echoed in "I tune myself" and re-inforced by the fairies contracted ring. This singularity of self-identity turns, however, upon a central duality, the "crescent moon" joined to the circular sun in Damon's scythe. Damon's "picture" rightly reveals his identity insofar as it represents both similarity and difference. It is the image of the changeable moon and constant sun joined in the scythe in which Damon "sees (his) picture done," and which points to the perfect identity Damon first formed with the sun. It is the sun's circle transposed onto fairies dancing under the crescent moon of Damon's scythe by which Damon "tunes himself." The poem here closes upon a simple and all-inclusive identity for Damon that is implied to be impossible by his ever-present mutability, his chameleonic complexity. The fairies' contracted circle points to a growing fixture of Damon's identity that is literally inscribed in the final stanzas.
Finally recreating in macro what each assertion of self-identity in stanzas 6,7, and 8 achieved in micro, Damon knows his final identity as simple through a complex loss of identity. Recognizing himself as changed in stanza 9, Damon "loses" the asserted self-presence of 6,7, and 8. That remembered simplicity and power are reduced to "grief." Damon reasserts his diminished, changed impotence and, finally, re-enacts that loss--cutting down his own presence with a self-castrating, inscriptive stroke of the scythe:
While thus he threw his elbow round,
Depopulating all the ground,
And, with his whistling scythe, does cut
Each stroke bettween the earth and rot,
The edged steel by careless chance
Did into his own ankle glance;
And there among the grass fell down,
By his own scythe, the Mower mown.
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