Sleeping in the Forest: RIP Mary Oliver

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me what it is you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"

Mary Oliver was that rare oxymoron – a bestselling modern-day poet. Mass popularity in poetry is often not a sign of distinction or skill.  All too frequently it denotes a sort of pop sentiment that propagates and fades in a moment.

This is not the case with Oliver. There is something in her apparent simplicity and accessibility, in her earthy subject matter and powers of observation, in the primitive wisdom of quiet selfhood and oneness with nature that strikes a chord with the modern crowds of busy professionals and car-bound helicopter parents.  She sings us back to a human root that stretches beyond ourselves and into the earth, into an earlier version of thought where the earth was not a “resource”, not a mine to be stripped and plundered of its riches, but a great and menacing and wonderful mystery.  Her poems embrace that mystery, and the mysteries it echoes in ourselves.

I first encountered Oliver in a junior college Creative Writing class.  One of her poems was given as an example (of what I don’t recall, natural imagery perhaps). It was a watershed moment. Up to that time my experiences with late 20^th century poets had been neutral and disinterested at best.  I had formed the opinion (on precious little experience) that it was pretentious stuff, mostly experimental and avant-garde in ways that alienated rather than attracted the reader.

The poem was “Wild Geese”, which remains one of her best-known and most ubiquitous poems, now almost a cliché in itself. But at the time it walloped me, and still does. The vibrant imagery – “the soft animal of your body”; “the sun and the clear pebbles of rain”; “the wild geese, high in the clean blue air” – sang of wildness and connection and human imperfection in a way that I had never encountered.

Oliver was a garden door that led me to discover there were many other incredible poets of that era – Seamus Heaney & Robert Bly, Wendell Berry & Raymond Carver; Maxine Kumin & Lisel Mueller, to scratch just the surface. I might never have ventured beyond the perimeter.

But it is Oliver I still come back to more than any of the others. She’s half sage, half wood nymph, going out to commune with the earth and somehow carry it back to the page.  Her quiet tree-songs soothe my soul, and that may be the greatest purpose that poetry can have.

"When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver (© 1992)

When death comes

like the hungry bear in autumn;

when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

when death comes

like the measle-pox;

when death comes

like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:

what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything

as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,

tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something

precious to the earth.

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.