the necessary climate for engaging in the process
of correspondence, or imaginative apprehension
of nature as revelatory.
Her treatment of death illustrates this. She
notices not only the brute fact of death—much of
her poetry is given over to an unflinching exami-
nation of the power of death in the natural
world—but also asks: what value do we give it
in our experience? Is death a final, irrevocable
darkness? Or does life somehow endure? Two
poems about flowers pulse with the tension of
these questions.
In ‘‘Poppies,’’ Oliver engages in an inner dia-
logue, a painful struggle with herself in which she
weighs in the balance the two most basic facts.
The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
Abruptly, Oliver shifts her tack, observing:
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t
sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
Then another shift:
but now, for a while,
the roughage
shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
As if unsure of whether to trust what she sees
with her own eyes and knows from personal
experience, Oliver relents again:
Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.
Honesty, it would seem, prevents her from
denying the harsh reality of the ‘‘black, curved
blade.’’ Yet, in spite of this, she allows herself a
final expression of defiance:
But I also say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness,
when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive.Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—
What kind of holiness is this? Certainly not a
flight into the transcendent. Rather, holiness and
happiness arise here in and through the light. The
‘‘bright fields’’ of the poppies invite her to lie
down in their midst, to immerse herself in their
light, to be ‘‘touched by their rough and spongy
gold.’’ And she does. ‘‘Washed and washed / in
the river / of earthly delight,’’ Oliver emerges with
a new sense of the power of that light, perhaps
with a new sense of faith. Without for a moment
denying the force of the ‘‘black, curved blade,’’
she is nevertheless emboldened by her experience
to ask a parting question (one that becomes a
kind of credo):
and what you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?
The dialogue of the poem has the same rhyth-
mic pace and sense of inevitable movement of day
followed by night into a new day and so on. We
move from the ‘‘orange flares’’ to ‘‘indigos of
darkness’’ to ‘‘roughage [shining] with its yellow
hair’’ to the ‘‘cold, black, curved blade [of] loss’’ to
the ‘‘light [which] is an invitation to happiness.’’
Light and darkness here are woven into a single
fabric, suggested by a single, graspable image: the
poppy itself is an indigo center circled by orange
flares. To set them in opposition is to pose a false
division. Still, the image also suggests a profound
struggle and tension, a recognition that one does
feel pulled—now toward the ‘‘bright fields,’’ now
toward the ‘‘deep, blue night.’’ Oliver is honest
enough not to skirt this struggle or to suggest that
the ‘‘indigos of darkness’’ have nothing to teach
her. But neither is she prepared to admit that the
swathe cut by the ‘‘black, curved blade’’ is final,
irrevocable, incapable of yielding—somehow—to
light.
Such issues are intensely personal, which
probably helps to explain why Oliver has taken
up the mode of personal address in her recent
poems. This technique serves to sharpen the work
of correspondence, compelling the reader to
reckoninaverypersonalwaywiththecostof
really noticing the natural world. In ‘‘Peonies,’’
Oliver considers these flowers as...
pools of lace,
white and pink—... [which]The Black Snake