critical importance of increased sensual percep-
tion. For her, ‘‘joy / is a taste before / it’s anything
else... ’’ and ‘‘the only way to tempt happiness
into your mind is by taking it / into the body first,
like small / wild plums.’’ According to Manousos,
Oliver’s vision of man’s sensual union with nature
becomes celebratory and religious in the deepest
sense. In ‘‘The Fawn,’’ the worshipper questions
‘‘what is holiness?’’ as she succumbs not to the
ringing church bells but ‘‘to the woods instead,’’
calling ‘‘blessed’’ a momentary touching of spirits
between herself and a newborn fawn.
The results of a psychic journey which ele-
vates man’s sensual perception above his self-
consciousness are still polar—eliciting both joy
and pleasure, pain and terror. As man recognizes
the oneness of all forms of life, he joyfully expe-
riences glimpses of immortality and eternity. In
‘‘Pink Moon the Pond,’’ Oliver celebrates this
moment:
... the soul rises from your bones
and strides out over the water...
not even noticing
You are something else...
And that’s when it happens—
You see everything
through their eyes,
their joy, their necessity...
And that’s when you know
You will live whether you will or not,
one way or another,
because everything is everything else,
one long muscle.
Man finally sees his immortality as a self-
denying mortal life in communion with the eter-
nal processes of nature.
When man acknowledges his mortal partic-
ipation in the natural cycles of life, he is also
terrified by nature’s total disregard for the indi-
vidual, whether prey or predator. According to
Oates, Oliver, in ‘‘Winter in the Country,’’ reveals
the natural world’s refusal to divide individuals or
creatures into victims or oppressors. The narrator
states, ‘‘the terror of the country / Is not the easy
death... ’’ but ‘‘Is prey and hawk together, / still
flying, both exhausted, / In the blue sack of
weather.’’ Oliver insists that man must also take
his place in this frightening, unsentimental, unpo-
liticized natural world, for he too is subject to
waning natural powers. In ‘‘Farm Country,’’ the
speaker criticizes the view that ‘‘life is chicken
soup.’’ She urges man to act as decisively and
realistically as the farm wife does—‘‘sharpening
her knives, putting on the heavy apron and boots,
crossing the lawn, and entering the hen house.’’
Because of this elevated yet terrifying sensual
perception, man can be potentially renewed.
When he denies the superiority of his own self-
consciousness and acceptingly connects his own
mortality to the world around him, he is different.
No longer is he the ‘‘cruel but honest’’ one in
‘‘ColdPoem.’’Suchamankeeps‘‘...alive...tak-
ing one after another / the necessary bodies of
others, the many / crushed red flowers.’’ Neither
can he be a part of the dispassionate news audi-
ence in ‘‘Beyond the Snow Belt.’’ They ‘‘forget
with ease each far mortality’’ because ‘‘... except
as we have loved. / All news arrives as from a
distant land.’’
Instead, contemporary man can be more lov-
ing, caring, and sensitive as he participates in his
environment. His potential exists as surely as that
of the narrator’s ancestors in ‘‘Stark Boughs on
the Family Tree.’’ They ‘‘built great barns and
propped their lives / Upon a slow heartbreaking
care’’ as ‘‘they left the small / Accomplished, till
the great was done.’’ Like the niece in ‘‘Aunt
Mary,’’ he may even long to know the hidden
spirit of one so loud and fat. As he views the
skinny child in the family album ‘‘... in a time
before her glands / Grew wild as pumps, and
fleshed her to a joke,’’ he may even lament her
death, learning ‘‘how wise we grow, / Just as the
pulse of things slips from the hand.’’
As a different person, modern man can also
recognize that facing, coping, and adapting to
life’s trials and disappointments are the only
means of gaining inward peace and self-identity.
In ‘‘No Voyage,’’ Oliver documents the human
tendency to run away from the pain and unpleas-
antness experienced in life. The poem’s narrator
insists on the necessity to ‘‘inherit from disaster
before I move/... To sort the weeping ruins of my
house; / Here or nowhere I will make peace with
the fact.’’ To Oliver, as nature learns, so must
man. In ‘‘Storm,’’ as the speaker seeks shelter
from a deadly heaven ‘‘full of spitting snow,’’ she
marvels at ‘‘deer lying / In the pine groves,’’ ‘‘foxes
plunging home,’’ ‘‘crows plump / As black rocks
in cold trees.’’ She concludes that ‘‘what saves
them is thinking that dying / Is only floating
away into / The life of the snow’’—accepting
their place and time in the natural cycle of life
and fulfilling the complete potential of their
being.The Black Snake