the period marking the poem’s end. Through her
punctuation, line structure, caesuras, and enjamb-
ments, Oliver structurally supports her word
choices, images, and metaphors to produce a
small masterpiece of life and death.
Source:Diane Andrews Henningfeld, Critical Essay on
‘‘The Black Snake,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2010.
Douglas Burton-Christie
In the following essay, Burton-Christie examines
how Oliver reconciles the impulse to symbolize nature
with the desire to ‘‘let nature stand on its own
terms’’—a tension at work in ‘‘The Black Snake.’’
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright
coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades
I want to step through the door full of
curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage
of darkness?
In the opening lines of ‘‘When Death Comes,’’
poet Mary Oliver invitesus to consider with her
the final, irrevocable moment in all its starkness.
There is a painful ambiguity here. On the one
hand, death itself cannot be skirted; its inevitabil-
ity, driving force, and finality are clear—like the
hungry bear, the purse snapping shut, the measle-
pox, the ‘‘iceberg between the shoulder blades.’’
There is no hope for escape, no sense of a better
place beyond death—it is merely a ‘‘cottage of
darkness.’’ On the other hand, she is expressing a
hope that even at the moment of death she will
retain an interest in the shape and texture of
things. This is not, then, a meditation on eternal
life; it is a memento mori, a meditation on death.
Anticipating the day of her death in this way,
Oliver places herself in a long and ancient com-
pany of seekers, for whom the discipline of
memento mori represented the surest way of
retaining a firm grasp on life. And so it is with
her. She continues:
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than
an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular
and each name a comfortable music in the
mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and
something
precious to the earth.
Memento more here leads toward intimacy,
communion, kinship with ‘‘everything’’ that is.
Time and eternity? No answer is given to these
questions; none is needed. It is enough, she says,
to cherish each life for what it is, as common and
as singular as a field daisy. To treasure each body
as something ‘‘precious to the earth’’ is to keep
from being swept away, swallowed up in an anon-
ymous, opaque existence. This attention to the
particular is for Oliver a discipline, necessary for
cultivating and preserving the only spiritual
awareness that matters—an awareness of life’s
endless vitality and beauty:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world
into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something
particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and
frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having
visited this world.
With these last plaintive lines, we are brought
around to consider again that final moment,THESE TWO APPARENTLY DIVERGENT
IMPULSES, ONE ANTISYMBOLIC, THE OTHER
SYMBOLIC, EBB BACK AND FORTH IN THE POETRY
OF MARY OLIVER. HER ABILITY TO INTEGRATE
THEM WITHOUT CONFUSING THEM YIELDS AN
ORIGINAL VISION OF SPIRIT AND NATURE THAT IS
BOTH UTTERLY CONCRETE AND UTTERLY
TRANSCENDENT.’’The Black Snake