Mary Oliver was not just an American poet; she was an
American prophet. She was not only one of the most popular poets in American
literary history; she wrote in the same vein as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt
Whitman about the world, and humanity’s place in it.
Like a modern-day Emily Dickinson, she rarely traveled far
from home. When she did, she hardly wrote about it. No, poem after poem grew
from the minute and endlessly fascinating forests and seashores of her home in Cape
Cod. She wrote again and again about the black snake, the snapping turtle, the
wild roses, the surging sea. Each time, she brought us new insight into our own
world.
I speak in broad strokes. But her poetry means so much to
me, and has for a very long time. I didn’t appreciate poetry until I read her
work. I rarely read it, hardly understood it. Mary Oliver’s poems opened me to
all poetry. Through hers I began to read others, and now my shelves burst with
poetry books and my head is aswirl in poems I’ve memorized and I find myself
writing poetry.
The beauty of Oliver’s work is many-fold. It is accessible:
many who read her poems would not otherwise read poetry at all. It is rooted in
the classics: she once said that she found her two true loves early in life:
nature and dead poets. Steeped in the classics and roaming the world beyond
humans, she found truths that resonate deeply.
Many poets and critics express disdain for her work, but the
form of poetry is wide, and large enough to hold it all. Her poems, like
Dickenson and Whitman before her, reach multitudes; her tribe is vast and
varied.
I first heard her poems at an Audubon camp on an island off
the coast of Maine. I was in college; I had gotten a scholarship to attend the
camp for teachers and writers; I was a nascient environmental writer inspired
by Edward Abbey and Rachel Carson. One night around the fire, a camp instructor
recited “Wild Geese.” Like him, I memorized it.
Years later, at a writer’s conference in Montana, a group of
us spontaneously recited that poem together. What joy: that “You do not have to
be good.” That “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it
loves.” That “the world offers itself to your imagination, over and over
announcing your place...”
The thing is, in her I found someone who loved the
more-than-human world the way I do: deeply and fully, with an unabashedly
fierce allegiance, and with no assumption of human superiority. With, in fact, quite
the opposite: her poems remind us that the more-than-human world has much to
teach us. She was the willing supplicant, the monk wandering the fields and
shores all day to listen and transcribe.
Isn’t it plain the sheets of moss,
except that
they have no tongues, could lecture
all day if they wanted about
spiritual patience?
~
Landscape
A poet that titles a book What Do we Know has realized this essential truth: that we humans
do not know very much at all, though we act as if we know it all. That this
hubris is our downfall, and with it, much of the wild and wonderful world. But
though she did not avoid the sorrows, she continuously sang the songs of praise
for the world that is.
Her poems are an integral part of my life. I read “The Sun”
aloud to my family every summer solstice. “The Chance to Love Everything” hangs
on my wall joined to a crayon image of the Earth my son drew when he was seven.
Lines ring in my head:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer
is.
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, how to stroll
through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all
day.
~The Summer Day
such wild love—
do you think there is anywhere, in
any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed—
or have you too
gone crazy
for power, for things?
~ The Sun
For years and years I struggled
just to love my life. And then
the butterfly
rose, weightless, in the wind.
“Don’t love your life/ too much,”
it said,
and vanished
into the world.
~ One or Two
Things
When Mary Oliver died on January 17, through my grief I felt
gratitude. I am grateful that I found her poetry. Grateful to all the editors and
publishers who let her work out into the world. Grateful that she wrote
them, day after day, walking the woods and the dark ponds and then sitting at
her desk, so that they could find their way to me.
