Her life was luminescent, her poetry, more so. In the end, verses that she penned became her life and her obituary. Best to let her speak for herself through her words. Sophia, which is Wisdom? Yes. Salvation? Likely.
In her poem, Landscape, she wrote, “Every morning I walk like this around / the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.” Her last walk, real or remembered, may have been on January 16, 2019.
Poet Mary Oliver died at the age of 83 on January 17, 2019. In her poem, Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks, she asked, “What is so utterly invisible / as tomorrow?” And answered, “Not love, / not the wind, / not the inside of stone. / Not anything. / And yet, how often I’m fooled— / I’m wading along / in the sunlight—and I’m sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining / days ahead—…” But not now, except in our heart and imagination.
Though she died at her home in Hobe Sound on the Atlantic coast in southeastern Florida, she had spent over 40 years living in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Her poems are brief and accessible. Many of them were informed by the environs of Cape Cod where she wondered in meadows, along shore and tide pools, around ponds and marshes, and through the woods.
In a New York Times obituary, Margalit Fox noted that her poems “have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality.” In her poem, Some Questions you Might Ask, she asked, “Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl? Who has it, and who doesn’t?” How would you answer her questions?
While Walt Whitman was her muse, he was so much more. She wrote, “Whitman was the brother I did not have.” She wrote, “Down by the creek, or in the wide pastures I could still find on the other side of the deep woods [around Maple Heights, Ohio] I spent my time with my friend: my brother, my uncle, my best teacher.” Reflecting on her teenage years, she wrote, “In those years, truth was elusive—as was my own faith…. Whitman kept me from the swamps of a worse uncertainty, and I lived many hours within the lit circle of his certainty, and his bravado.”
In The Summer Day, she confessed, “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. / Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? / Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” She was asking you this last question and everything in your life depends on your answer.
T.S. Eliot wrote, “In my end is my beginning.” Oliver knew the truth of this. In When Death Comes she wrote, “When it’s over, I want to say all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. / When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder / if I have made of my life something particular, and real. / I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, / or full of argument. / I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
She certainly had her literary critics who, perhaps, were jealous of her popularity, who were drawn to poetry that was more obtuse, who took her simplicity literally, rather than symbolically, thus missing the complexity and wisdom. In Nicholson Baker’s novel, The Anthologist, the title character, Paul Chowder, scrawled in the margin of Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Volume One published by Beacon Press in 1992, “Mary Oliver is saving my life.” Salvation! In this life! Struggling to write an introduction to an anthology of poetry that he had compiled, neither his life nor his writing was working. Oliver knew that writing doesn’t work if your living doesn’t work. Chowder finds consolation in her poetry: “I immediately felt more sure of what I was doing,” he said, concluding that her poems are “very simple. And yet each has something.”
Were those critics looking for more pathos (or less)? Consider her poem, Wild Geese, where she wrote, “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 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.” More telling, given the circumstances of her childhood, was her poem, The Journey. In it Oliver wrote, “One day you finally knew / what you had to do, and began, / though the voices around you / kept shouting / their bad advice— … / 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 that you could save.”
In 2007, two years after the death of Molly Malone Cook, her partner of some 50 years, Oliver published Our World. It weaves together Cook’s photographs with her own writings. In it, Oliver wrote, “The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms.”
Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry in 1984 for her collection of 50 poems entitled American Primitive, including In Blackwater Falls where she wrote, “…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.”
Among the many awards she received for her 15 poetry and essay collections, the last was the 2019 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing. This was appropriate because Thoreau was also her muse. Her praise of Thoreau’s wisdom was captured in her poem, Going to Walden. Mary Oliver wrote, “It isn’t very far as highways lie. / I might be back by nightfall, having seen / The rough pines, and the stones, and the clear water. / Friends argue that I might be wiser for it. / They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper: / How dull we grow from hurrying here and there! / Many have gone, and think me half a fool / To miss a day away in the cool country. / Maybe./ But in a book I read and cherish, / Going to Walden is not so easy a thing / As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult / Trick of living, and finding it where you are.” Oliver found and expressed the essence of Walden through her poetry.
As she told Maria Shriver in a 2011 interview in Oprah’s magazine, O, “I made a world out of words. And it was my salvation.” And it has been ours as well, and will continue to be so as we explore her poetry.
Photo: Walden Pond, by Amy Meredith, November 3, 2014, (CC BY-ND 2.0), https:// www. flickr. com/photos/ jjandames /15520195427
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