May 29 2000
Mary Oliver's Poetry
Today I’d like to share some pieces by one of my favorite poets, Mary Oliver. Her writing has a meditative quality about it…like prayer…and attempts to decipher messages present in the natural world. A solitary, beautiful flower, a hummingbird paused in its flight, the change of seasons. Her poetry achieves a meaningfulness that so much recent nature poetry lacks. It veers away from gushing over beautiful scenes. She presents pictures of the natural world in a simple, respectful, considering manner and asks, “what can this tell us?” In “The Summer Day,” Oliver asks a series of questions about creation:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
(These questions are reminiscent of Wm. Blake’s: Tiger tiger burning bright, / In the forests of the night: / what immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?) She continues with a description of all of the fantastic details present in a particular grasshopper which suggests a creator of stupendous power. But instead of simply declaring that God exists and showering him with praise, Oliver claims she doesn’t know what a prayer is. She says:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed…
In the end, she turns to the reader and asks, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and beautiful life?” I’m going to consider that question throughout the day.
Here’s another lovely poem:
Morning
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
