Last week, I talked about the wonderful rhymes of Shakespeare’s comedies, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This week sticks with the poetry theme, but moves to my favorite modern poet: Mary Oliver.
Oliver was born in 1935, published her first book of poems in 1963, and died in early 2019. She is considered by many one of the best-selling poets of the United States.
As a poet, Oliver almost fits in with the Transcendentalists, heavily influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau. Most of her poems are inspired by the natural world, and she got most of her ideas from long walks in her hometown in Ohio or from New England, where she spent her adult life.
Her poems tend to be brief, easy to digest, and they combine imagery of the natural world with thoughts that reassure, challenge, or comfort.
My personal favorite of these poems is “The Wild Geese”, a poem that finds comfort in the order of the world and reminds readers that they belong in it.
Oliver attests her fascination of the natural world to her childhood, which she said was difficult but helped her write by creating her own world. It’s obvious in her poems that the world she created had a lot to do with the natural world, where she felt the most at home.
One of her greatest talents when it comes to the natural world was her skill of observation, of noticing the smallest details and finding meaning in them. She took walks for hours every day, but each poem covers a span of only a few moments, in which the natural world reveals its beauty.
My favorite poem that exemplifies this is her most famous poem, “The Summer Day.” It tells a story in which Oliver encounters a grasshopper, then questions her place in the world and the expectations placed on her.
Indeed, Oliver lived much outside of norms and expectations placed on her. She seemed to prefer spending time with the natural world over spending time with people, aside from her partner, Molly Malone Cook, who she lived with for forty years until Cook’s death.
Therefore, still others of her poems ruminate on actions she takes that seem absurd or odd, but remind us that there is much that we do not understand. My favorites of these are “Angels” and “Watering the Stones,” both of which challenge our perceptions of what is true, and provide meaning by doing so.
Mary Oliver’s poetry is consistently beautiful, rich, and meaningful, and many of her poems have comforted me in hard times. The accessibility of meaning in her poems make her a great place to start for someone new to poetry, or a great next read for a longtime poetry fan.
I will leave you with advice from Oliver’s poem “The Gift:” “Be slow if you must, but let / The heart still play its true part.” Like many of Oliver’s poems, it’s a lesson we can all learn from the world around us.
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