Mary
Oliver, who died on Jan. 17 at age 83, was probably America's favorite contemporary poet. As one obituary I read points outs, she
was rare in possessing both a large popular following and sufficient respect
from the literary prize-givers to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Award. Commentators often used the word "accessible" in explaining her
popularity.
But accessibility
is the very the quality that kept some academics at arm's length: Not only does
her work offer spiritual consolation, her poems simply weren't 'difficult' enough. They didn't need critics and scholars to explain what they 'meant.'
One of Mary
Oliver's best loved poems, cited in a number of the appreciations and obituaries
written since her death, is "In Blackwater Woods." The title itself
is an interesting choice, because the poem itself offers so many opportunities
for a grander statement. But the poet eschewed grand statements in choosing a title, perhaps wary
of the grandiose.
The poem
could have been titled "Fulfillment," "Learning,"
"Salvation" or even "Spring," or something with that big word
'spring' in it; or of course "letting go." Others have named their
poems "Letting Go."
I think the
title was meant to suggest 'no grand claims are being offered here,' though in
fact the grandest ones do arrive -- naturally. I think the chosen title understates
the ambition of the poem.
Similarly, Mary
Oliver's "accessible" poems don't rely on unusual vocabulary,
difficult syntax, or complicated formal structures, but that doesn't mean they are
short of artistry.
Here's the
poem:
In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
(from American Primitive, 1983)
The poem
consists entirely of common words and is structured in four-line, free verse
stanzas. The formal patterning of the stanzas creates that 'certain formal
feeling' that Dickinson famously borrowed from standard English hymns. The
structure also helps establish a certain expectation, the one that reminds us that
'poetry' has the same origins as 'song.' Yet you could write the words and
sentences out, just as they are ordered here, in a paragraph, and the result would read like
prose. It would be grammatical.
But this is
poetry -- i.e. the intensification of feeling -- not prose.
The lines
are very short, frequently consisting of only two, three, or four words.
This is a common approach to free verse, popular for a century or more,
reminding us of William Carlos Williams' iconic miniature "So Much Depends." The basic approach to enjambment in this sort of free verse --
where to end the line -- is to follow spoken English syntax. But in this poem
the poet frequently breaks syntactical units into even smaller pieces.
"Look,
the trees" therefore stands by itself as a line. The enjambment turns
these three words into a (temporarily) completed statement: 'Look! the trees.'
Almost everybody who writes about nature has written something like this. It's
Thoreau's advice on achieving wisdom and spiritual freedom: look at trees.
The lines
that follow show that each foreshortened statement is a cause of wonder.
Imagine this: trees/ 'are turning' -- yes, we think, we know trees turn --
'their own bodies'... Imagine that! Sometime human beings
do try to turn 'their own bodies' into something else, but it usually involves
new clothes
'into
pillars' -- yet another miracle!
And then --
wait for it -- which is exactly what the stanza break following this two-word
line makes us do -- "of light."
Each of
these steps to the completed clause, a grammatically complete statement, is
itself a marvel, and the tiny pauses -- which the eye of the reader respects,
even if the brain rushes on -- gives the reader's mind pause as well.
Then, there
is the matter of poet's chosen words.
Patterned
syntax keeps the sentence alive in the second stanza. We are often told that
poems appeal to the senses; here's an example. Those same trees that wondrously
turn themselves into pillars of light, are also, as we read in the second stanza
"giving off the rich/ fragrance of
cinnamon/ and fulfillment." Poetry imagines with the guidance of the
senses. Because we know the scent of cinnamon, we are more likely to make the
leap to "fulfillment." We don't 'smell' fulfillment physically; only
metaphorically. And fulfillment is one the themes of the poem.
Following
syntax once again, a new stanza offers yet another completed clause -- all these
clause follow the familiar Biblical and classical imperative "Look,"
the poem's first word. A classical guide would typically follow that word with
an exclamation point. A century ago English poet-novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote
"Look! We have come through!" -- a poem about not destroying your marriage
in the first few months.
But Mary
Oliver eschews the exclamation point for the modest comma, as if to say to the
reader, 'you will shortly discover these wonders yourself.'
This third
stanza offers a new clause -- pointing out a new wonder -- beginning with"the long tapers/ of cattails" Again, an appeal to
the senses, the word 'tapers' offers a description of what cattails look like,
but also suggests another meaning of the word 'tapers' -- candles -- building on the comparison of trees to "pillars of
light."
This stanza
then completes with the marvelous metaphor of "the blue shoulders" --
pause for stanza break -- "of the ponds."
Through the
remainder of this short poem, the line breaks largely follow the ordinary divisions
of syntactical units, but often vary a single word away from the natural break
point. So we learn that every pond "no matter what its/ name is, is/" -- stanza
break -- "nameless now."
The foreshortened
syntax, I believe, reflects the interruptions in our conventional thought
patterns brought about by the experience the poem seeks to express. The rebirth
of nature is the great interrupter of ordinary patterns of thought. Human events are
commonly shaped into stories; they have a beginning, a middle and an end. But the life
the world -- its trees and its ponds -- exceeds these patterns. Nature, as understood
by the seasons, has a beginning, a turn, an end -- and then, guess what? -- a
new beginning.
The last five stanzas of this
marvelous poem are almost as pointed in their meaning as a sermon, even
incorporating the daringly loaded term "salvation." "Every year,"
the poem tells us, and "everything" the speaker has learned,
"leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know."
And as if
that were not 'meaning' enough for any poem, much less any beautifully
descriptive 'nature poem,' the poet offers a frankly prescriptive advisory on
how to live.
"To
live in this world," she tells us, "you must be able/ to do three
things:"
You can go
back to the poem and read those three things yourself.
Then ask whether
you have heard or read a better, more economically stated expression of three such
important 'things.' Many of us -- readers, that is, who turn to poetry rather
than to creeds for sustenance -- are likely to come away (as I am) from this
poem resolved to take these words to heart, to remember them, and to live their
message.
And
many of us are likely, or at least tempted, to believe (perhaps as a matter of
faith) that Mary Oliver did just that.
Here are few thoughts about twilight: Right from the top, we have of course perhaps everybody's favorite classic TV series title: "The Twilight Zone." 
Here's classical reference (found while searching for information about the ancient Roman Republic destroyed by the famous Empire) that winds up with a familiar metaphor: "Dramatic artist, natural scientist and
philosopher, Plutarch is widely regarded as the most significant historian of
his era, writing sharp and succinct accounts of the greatest politicians and
statesman of the classical period. His famous work The Lives, a series of
biographies spanning the Graeco-Roman age, illuminates the
twilight of the old Roman Republic from 157-43 BC." 
On a homier note, my comment on a sunset/moonrise combination glimpsed last August: "Twilight over Quincy Harbor, viewed from Wollaston Beach. The full moon up before full darkness."
To which I appended, "We must be in the Twilight Zone. A world of horrific contradictions that make decent people run screaming into the streets."
