when everything that has gone before will stand
etched sharply before us. This memento mori is
really a meditation on the present moment, rais-
ing a pointed question (and a choice) about the
kind of life that is unfolding before us, the kind of
life we are or are not choosing: are we ‘‘sighing,’’
‘‘frightened,’’ ‘‘full of argument’’? Are we simply
visiting this world? Or are we making of our lives
something ‘‘particular and real’’?
For over thirty years, Mary Oliver has been
putting such questions to herself and to her read-
ers. With her intense gaze focused carefully on the
details of the ordinary, the everyday—especially
in the natural world—she asks whether seeing
more clearly can lead to living more deeply. She
is well known in literary circles, having received a
Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for theAmerican Primitive,
and a National Book Award for her recentNew
and Selected Poems. Among scholars of religion
she is less well-known, however; to my knowledge
no one from this community has yet given her
poetry the sustained attention her work richly
deserves. Oliver’s call to notice and reimagine
the natural world as a place pulsing with spirit is
absolute and uncompromising. Yet she is unwill-
ing to idealize the natural world or to leave it
behind in seeking heightened spiritual awareness.
Rather, she articulates an utterly particular and
concrete sense of spiritual transformation that
emerges in and through the ordinary, transfig-
ured by poetic imagination.
I want to probe a particular tension in
Oliver’s work, using categories employed by critic
Sherman Paul: adequation and correspondence.
InFor Love of the World, Paul defines adequation
as describing carefully, letting things be in their
concrete particularity, refraining from the temp-
tation to symbolize. It is a literary equivalent that
‘‘respects the thing and lets it stand forth... an
activity in words that is literally comparable to
the thing itself.’’ Correspondence refers to the
search for symbolic meaning, the process of mak-
ing imaginative connections between the ever-
shifting and fathomless worlds of self and nature.
In the tradition of American nature writing,
Thoreau stands as one of the most vivid exam-
ples of a person given to adequation: he ‘‘res-
pected particular things and was skeptical of the
sovereign-idealist-symbol-making mind.’’ Emer-
son, on the other hand, gave lucid expression to
the process of correspondence; he wished ‘‘to take
symbolic possession of things’’ and focused on ‘‘the
epiphanic moment when a fact flowered into a
truth.’’ 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.
Adequation, for Oliver, means refraining
from idealizing or symbolizing the natural world,
letting it stand forth in all its stark otherness. It
means recognizing there may be no meaning there
at all, or at least no symbolic meaning suggestive
of transcendence. In ‘‘Rain’’ we hear how:
At night
under the trees
the black snake
jellies forward
rubbing
roughly
the stems of the bloodroot,
the yellow leaves,
little boulders of bark,
to take off
the old life....
In the distance
the owl cries out.
The snake knows
these are the owl’s woods,
these are the woods of death,
these are the woods of hardship
where you crawl and crawl,
where you live in the husks of trees,
where you lie on the wild twigs
and they cannot bear your weight,
where life has no purpose
and is neither civil nor intelligent.
Notice the rhythm of the language here. The
short phrases are themselves suggestive of the
slow, methodical ‘‘jellying forward of the snake.’’
By the time we meet the owl, however, this slow
building rhythm begins to take on another, more
ominous connotation: these are ‘‘the woods of
death / the woods of hardship... where life has
no purpose / and is neither civil nor intelligent.’’
The simple self-evident clarity of these lines does
little to mask the horror that lurks beneath them:
this is the way life really is, the poem suggests, and
neither you nor I nor the snake nor the owl can do
anything about it. Such sentiments may seem to
imply a harsh, pessimistic view of the natural
world and of life itself. I think, however, that it is
truer to say we have here a clear-eyed appreciation
of life’s rich-textured otherness, of its capacity to
defy our attempts to subsume it easily or simply
into our categories.The Black Snake