I discovered poet Mary Oliver last year around the time that her newest poetry book, Felicity, came out. I read poetry continuously, because I believe that poetry is the cornerstone for good writing; if you have a good grasp of poetry, you have a good grasp on language and diction and all the pacing needed for good writing. So I was delighted to discover Oliver and, quite immediately, fall in love with her poetry.
Oliver has been writing poetry since 1963, when she published her first poetry book at 28 years old. Her American Primitive collection won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. Other books have garnered countless awards for their beauty and simplicity.
It’s plain to see why Oliver’s poetry is so celebrated. She has a singular style that provides a window into the natural world that is not only a lovely experience but also a transformative one. In many of Oliver’s poems, one could imagine her sitting beside a pond, enjoying nature, or walking her dog through a park or resting on a bench, watching the sky. She takes the most ordinary circumstances and makes them come alive. Her images are spectacular. Take this passage, from her poem, “Spring:”
“Even before the sun itself
hangs, dissattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.”
The picture she gives us is beautiful in its clarity, the rising of the sun like a yellow ocean.
Here’s a passage from her poem, “Wings:”
“But my bones knew something wonderful
about the darkness—
and they thrashed in their cords,They fought, they wanted
to lie down in that silky mash
of the swamp, the sooner
to fly.”
What fantastic imagery. Oliver is telling us that there is something good in the dark—flying, being able to soar above the earth without any attachments—something we cannot find in the light. This is something only a body would know, not a brain, because the brain is afraid of the dark.
This passage from “The Kingfisher” tells us, again, the good (beauty) found in the bad (dying):
“I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?”
It’s the daring challenge of nature: find a “splash of happiness” in every day of our lives. Oliver uses the natural world to remind us that even though the flowers pass away, we can still find the happiness of having watched them bloom.
In “The Deer,” Oliver theorizes about what happens to the body after death:
“When we die the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.”
I found this image lovely, that we would break apart, back into the natural world, and our essence travels on, climbing a hill, still entombed in nature.
In “The Loon on Oak Head Pond,” Oliver showcases her ability to craft a beautiful turn of phrase:
“You come every afternoon, and wait to hear it.
You sit a long time, quiet, under the thick pines,
in the silence that follows.
As though it were your own twilight.
As though it were your own vanishing song.”
She is writing of someone she has observed, it seems, someone old, and the someone watches and waits in the silence of the afternoon, as if awaiting his own death.
Oliver explores more the question of death in “What Is it?”
“Of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be—that anything is ever final—
that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?”
It’s clear that Oliver can hear the communication of the natural world; she hears the words it speaks about death and life and hope. She captures that perfectly in her words.
I loved her commentary on sorrow from “The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water:”
“But the lilies
are slippery and wild—they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepestspurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.”
In “Snake,” Oliver echoes another great natural poet, Emily Dickinson, in writing about hope:
“There are so many stories,
more beautiful than answers.
I follow the snake down to the pond,thick and musty he is
as circular as hope.”
Hope is circular. It never ends. I love that she took something–hope being forever–and put it in her own words, by watching a snake.
I enjoyed her musings in “Roses, Late Summer:”
“If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn’t mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
or any other foolish question.”
She is essentially saying that the ordinary human worries and wonderings do not occur to the natural world—and that gives them a peace and a beauty that we cannot achieve ourselves.
Here’s one more passage, from the poem “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” in which Oliver writes of death. I found it beautifully phrased:
“And then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes,
to lurk there,
like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows—
so I thought:
maybe death
isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light
wrapping itself around us—as soft as feathers—
that we are instantly weary
of looking, and looking, and shut our eyes,
not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river
that is without the least dapple or shadow—
that is nothing but light—scalding, aortal light—
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.”
Mary Oliver’s poetry is transcendent and spiritual and beautiful, and I’ve since picked up many of her other books, to study a true master at work.
