Such an awareness leads to a posture of
respect, of humility before the natural world, a
refusal to give in to the impulse to domesticate. In
the same poem, she describes watching as...
The wasp sits on the porch of her paper
castle.
The blue heron floats out of the clouds.
The fish leap, all rainbow and mouth, from
the dark waters.
She resolves:
And I do not want anymore to be useful, to
be docile, to lead
children out of the fields into the text
of civility, to teach them they are (they are
not) better than the grass.
In a similar vein, in ‘‘October’’ Oliver des-
cribes how...
One morning
the fox came down the hill, glittering and
confident,
and didn’t see me—and I thought:
so this is the world.
I’m not in it.
It is beautiful.
One can hardly imagine a starker statement
of the need to resituate—even evacuate—the
human in order to let the natural world stand
forth. But there is a paradox here: after all, it
requires a human observer to notice the fox ‘‘glit-
tering and confident’’ and to reflect on the possi-
bility of the fox’s existing apart from the human.
There is truth in Oliver’s observation all the
same; nature does not need us to be what it is.
It has its own integrity, proceeds on its own way
with or without us. Is it, in its wild independence,
‘‘beautiful’’ as Oliver suggests—even though this
word implies a very human and subjective judg-
ment? In the context of this poem, ‘‘beautiful’’
appears to have less an aesthetic than an ethical
connotation—suggesting that part of what ade-
quation asks of us is to relinquish our habit of
determining the value and purpose of nature.
Such relinquishment may also require us to
recast the question of the soul. In ‘‘Some Ques-
tions You Might Ask,’’ Oliver queries:
Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?...
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?Does it have one lung, like the snake
and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the
maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting
alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and
their shining leaves?
While there is a whimsical naivete ́ to such
questions, there is also a hard-edged seriousness.
The history of theology is full of attempts to sit-
uate different species along a continuum; all are
valued, yet all are nonetheless ordered in a hier-
archy of being. In such a scheme the soul is the
province of the human alone. Oliver pointedly
challenges this anthropocentrism. Yet she does
so not by argument, but by a simple series of
unnerving, unanswerable questions. Such ques-
tions seem, on the face of it, to stand in contrast
to Oliver’s desire to let nature stand forth on its
own terms, as if she is suggesting the need to
impute ‘‘soul’’ to nonhuman species in order to
give them their proper value.
These questions can, however, be read in
another way, as a means of playfully turning the
entire question of soul on its head. If we have
indeed spiritualized soul,madeittheeliteposses-
sion of human beings, havewe not thereby reduced
the natural world to a domain bereft of enduring
value and meaning? In asking such questions
Oliver seeks less to ‘‘elevate’’ the natural world
than to ‘‘ground’’ soul. There is something here
akin to Duns Scotus’s insistence on haeccitas, the
‘‘thisness’’ of reality, or Hopkins’s ‘‘inscape,’’ the
sense that even in the humblest objects, an entire
universe burgeons forth. By posing such questions,
Oliver asks us to revise our conventional assump-
tions about the soul and about the natural world,
providing a new imaginative space in which to
encounter nature and, perhaps, ourselves.
It is in this sense that Oliver pursues the
process of correspondence or symbolic reflection.
She shows no inclination to impose upon nature
an alien symbolic structure of meaning; she seeks
instead to understand how and where the natural
world takes root within us, how we are challenged
and even transformed in the process of wakening
to nature’s soulful presence. In this sense, adequa-
tion, or respect for nature’s ‘‘otherness,’’ providesThe Black Snake