Mary Oliver (b. 1935): Poetry for Sunday: “nobody gets out of it”

The author of this blog, her husband, their children August 1985, so Jim 36, baby Izzy one and a half, Laura over 7, me, 38, @The Cloisters, NYC

Dear friends and readers,

This is not a foremother poet posting — as after all Mary Oliver is still with us. I preface it with images that have nothing particularly to do with Oliver, but everything to do with why I’m putting some poetry for Sunday here. My husband and I used to love to walk along the top of Manhattan by the Hudson River where we could see the cliffs, though on most days they lacked the gorgeousness of Bellows’s vision

George Bellows (1882-1925), Terra

and some of Oliver’s poetry (as in her famous often-reprinted “Poppies“, where I fancy a less green-blue is intended).

As some may know, my beloved husband, Jim Moody, died October 9th, 2013, and by way of informing the people who read this blog (as I may recur to this topic again) I’m offering some of Oliver’s intendedly consoling poems and a brief excursis and critique. Call this a sort of foremother poet posting.

It is now autumn; during my husband’s illness (esophageal cancer metastasized into his liver) for us time outside us stood still; we never noticed summer had come and gone:

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.

Mary Oliver is said to combine environmentalism with a woman’s voice. As I am now a committed environmentalist I like this, but agree with feminists who suggest that identifying women with the natural world (as she sometimes does) hardly empowers them as people.

This blog was prompted by my coming across this characteristic poem:

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.

I’m not there yet; it’s more like this for me:

Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.

If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.

And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?

*

I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,

whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

*

It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.

*

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?

Slowly

*

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

*

You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

*

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

Nature savage in tooth and claw, as Tennyson put it.

Another accusation which has justice is Oliver forces her endings to be optimistic. No more than Jane Austen (say, reading Hannah More or Laetitia Hawkins) do I like to be coerced into certain conclusions. Do you think she would have liked Oliver’s poems?

As one of the members of Wompo (Ann) wrote a few years ago, if only Oliver had left off the last line of this:

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stetching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvacious 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.

Ann said we should end with the cat:

I haven’t got a black cat: we have Ian, our ginger tabby, and behind him you see our copy of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.

A good friend, however, pointed this one out to us on Women Writers through the Ages (@ Yahoo), discerning in the ending needed irony:

When I am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

Judy Geater suggested the poem is about the “difficulty of writing , and the need to find quiet moments which can give strength to cope with the rest of life.” So there is a Wordsworthian romantic current here (“The world is too much with us, late and soon … “)

I could end on that note, but an attentive reading of Oliver also yields the insight life, the world are harsh and exciting:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The world announces your place–not that we announce our place. It is pre-determined, like being born a wild goose … For my part I have ever preferred the quiet, as in Cowper’s:

Scenes must be beautiful which daily viewed
Please daily, and whose novelty survives
Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years …

but I recognize the truth of the poem, only must we stay in the place we are thrown. I did not — and without having broken away I would not have had my 46 fulfilled years with my Jim.

**********************

Mary Oliver and a sweet dog

There are many on-line sites about Mary Oliver with selections of poetry. Poetseers, the Poetry Foundation; an npr interview whose problem is the usual: Oliver and and the interviewer do not so much as mention what is destroying the natural world and its people, let off the hook those who continue to profit from all that makes and is the cancer scourge (see also Vigil and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring).

Ellen