all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
bend their bright bodies
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again—
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Suddenly and dramatically the tone changes,
as does the subject of Oliver’s observations. She
turns her attention directly to us, the bystanders,
asking:
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror
beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and
barefoot, into the
garden, and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and
pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their
lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before
they
are nothing, forever?
Here we are beckoned not only to observe, to
appreciate these ‘‘pools of lace,’’ dancing under a
shifting wind, but to abandon our detached per-
spective and run to embrace them, filling our
arms and whispering tender words of love before
it is too late, before they are ‘‘nothing, forever.’’
These two moments—appreciative description
and loving embrace—are integrally related. It is
only by carefully describing that one can really
come to see the peonies, to notice they are passing
from our midst. What is at issue here is something
as personal and particular and ultimate as
whether we are prepared to risk loving this
world, knowing we cannot hold onto it—perhaps
because we cannot hold onto it. The sense of
ultimate loss again serves to sharpen our sense
of the natural world’s haunting, alluring texture;
it poses for us a stark choice about what we will
do, how we will live now.
Mary Oliver’s poetry is filled with such stark
choices. Yet it is also a poetry of delicate balance,
especially in the tension she maintains between
adequation and correspondence. By etching shar-
ply the world we live in, its fragile beauty and its
perplexing darkness, she lays before us a simple,
but demanding question: are we prepared to pay
more careful attention to what is unfolding before
us? To pay attention means, for Oliver, to relin-
quish, to let go—of the need to symbolize, of the
need to impose meaning on everything we see. It
means learning to let the natural world be in
its unassimilated otherness. Yet she also encour-
ages us to reflect symbolically on the world of
mystery evoked by our encounter with the natural
world. She asks: what does it feel like, what does it
mean to dwell in that mystery? Adequation and
correspondence, letting be and imaginatively
appropriating—both are necessary if we are to
live deeply and see clearly. This is the challenge
Oliver holds out to us. In a recent poem, aptly
titled ‘‘Yes! No!,’’ she invites us to live within this
tension:
Yes! No! The
swan, for all his pomp, his robes of glass
and petals, wants only
to be allowed to live on the nameless pond.
The catbrier
is without fault. The water, thrushes, down-
among the sloppy
rocks, are going crazy with happiness. Imag-
ination is better
than a sharp instrument. To pay attention,
this is our endless
and proper work.
‘‘Paying attention’’ here means letting nature
be (the swan, [who] wants only to be allowed to
live on the nameless pond) and infusing it with
meaning (the water thrushes... going crazy with
happiness). In balancing these two seemingly
divergent impulses, Oliver evokes a deeply inte-
grated spirituality of the ordinary, helping us to
see and embrace what is, after all, one world,
where nature, spirit and imagination rise together.
Source:Douglas Burton-Christie, ‘‘Nature, Spirit, and
Imagination in the Poetry of Mary Oliver,’’ inCross
Currents, Vol. 46, Spring 1996, pp. 77–87.Jean B. Alford
In the following essay, Alford explores how in
Oliver’s poems, including ‘‘The Black Snake,’’
humans struggle with mortality and ultimately
find renewal in nature.
Mary Oliver is a distinctive poet in the fashion-
ably surreal and escapist world of contemporaryThe Black Snake