Dive into the poems for Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings imbibed with the solace of her observations in Nature.
In an interview with Krista Tippett in 2015, Mary Oliver profoundly proclaimed – ‘I did find the entire world, in looking for something. But I got saved by poetry, and I got saved by the beauty of the world.’ Mary Jane Oliver, born in the semi-rural suburbs of Maple Heights, Ohio, Cleveland, passed away on January 17, 2019. She had been bestowed with the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in America for her contributions to the world of meditative poetry. Her stylistic gestures convey the dissociative reflections of a hummingbird, softly cooing away in dense forests, undulating in the greens with a kinship of a neighbor.
Her convergence with an insufficient childhood bestows an inherent loneliness, a silence that acts as a second skin, lulling her poetic triumph into a longing that no effort could reach. Her poems are all about this resignation, a loss that she never regretted or searched for. Benevolently jostling with the impending noise, her poems carry the scent of the soul, which has neither complaints nor demands. Writing poetry from the tender age of 14, Oliver has created a shrine of solace for herself. A Thousand Mornings: Poems (2012) carries the reader through her observations of the coastlines of Provincetown, Massachusetts, resting for stops at the momentous places that gripped her attention.
Belonging In The Mind
In the first poem, ‘I Go Down To The Shore’, Oliver laments about her miserable convictions to the vast spectacle of the Sea. The heartfelt dependence on Nature’s motherhood instigates a disillusionment as soon as the Sea responds ‘in its lovely voice:/ Excuse me, I have work to do.’ Oliver’s tone hears the banality of her pessimism and indulges herself in the essential elements of life. This is echoed in another of her creations, ‘Poem Of The One World’, where she writes:
‘This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating above the water
and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to.’
Oliver’s poems are reflective inclinations on Thoreau, Tagore, and Aurobindo. Her opulence lies in non-dualism, an overwhelming Oneness that is impossible to surpass. All of it, with the passage of Time, mingles into a radical beauty. She proliferates with this knowledge and acts accordingly, for ‘sometimes breaking the rules is just/ extending the rules.’ She falls back on her mind to honor the rush she brushes aside. It is the mind that puts the motions into an innate tranquillity, pulling her thoughts towards the Sublime. She does not hesitate to declare thus:
‘But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.’
The Ship We Are On, Burning the World As We Go
The primary component of all her poems is instilled in the magic of Nature. She speaks in a prose that seems to take the art of poetry. Assembling a variety of desperate emotions, she understands life backwards, although, as Kierkegaard had said, it’s lived forward. Percy, her beloved dog, with her white curls, remains unreachable as she leaves the spirits of the Earth, but she touches her like the music that you can feel but never hum. Her life decimates into confusion, with her only refuge being the gratitude of fiction. She writes :
‘And now you’ll be telling stories
of my coming back
And they won’t be false, and they won’t be true,
But they’ll be real.’
In the poem ‘Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness’, Oliver designates life to ‘what was’ and the vivacity of ‘what will be’. It is an art to witness the separation to which ‘the world descends/ into a rich mash, in order that/ it may resume.’ She recounts Blake in the following poem, taking the cue from the silvery and cool space that his corpse withheld. She asks with the innocence of pathos welcomed:
‘When death is about to happen
does the body grow heavier, or lighter? …
When a man says he hears angels singing
he hears angels singing.’
How To Live As A Mockingbird
Humankind in Oliver’s poems resonates with the creatures in pain. She places the Mockingbird side by side with her companion as if in a statement of solidarity. The gestures are subtle, yet instinctive, kinetic in a resplendent energy. Oliver describes the creature in its usual splendor, although with a deeply reactive melancholy. She writes:
‘for he is the thief of other sounds—
whistles and truck brakes and dry hinges
plus all the songs
of other birds in his neighborhood;
mimicking and elaborating,
he sings with humor and bravado,
so I have to wait a long time
for the softer voice of his own life.’
Oliver is not against the bravado of the bird, but she mocks the pompous grandeur that it confidently longs for. Her attention is forced upon the world without her positive consent. She tries to seep in the world’s light just like the soil absorbs water, slowly and resolutely. However, the poet immediately notices a change. The mockingbird makes sure he is alone, ‘as though his subject now/ was his true self, / which of course was as dark and secret/ as anyone else’s.’ The bird sings to the sky. It rolls around for that moment when he is motioning to the ‘impatience of stone’ and imagining the ‘original clarity’ of the heavy rivers. This kind of observation is derived from empathy and an intense love for the world.
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Bob Dylan And Discovering the Morning Light
Oliver begins her book with an epigraph from Bob Dylan – ‘Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.’ Honoring the songs of Gods with so many names, Oliver makes the shepherds sing alongside the mountains while the dance songs of the bees open up the flowers of the morning light. It is a chorus, a homage to the singular effervescence of Dylan that she floats around with. For her, the greatest of love affairs is still the congregation between the violin and the human body. She confesses her desire to escape:
‘… It’s impossible not
to remember wild and want it back. So
if someday you can’t find me you might
look into that tree or—of course
it’s possible—under it.’
Oliver leaves you with a metaphor impalpable in the initial lines of the poem. You hear the ‘thrush singing/ in the glowing woods/ he is only passing through.’ But, you seldom wish to stop at that. You are thrilled to hear the deep dark voice, as though you are being beckoned by the wild baritone. The restful silence of the night changes your palette, and it brings you back to the position you began with. Was that a requirement? Is it the rule of the Universe to dispose of a selfless contrast just to enhance the beauty of the sound? Who knows how it could be defined? But you accept it’s the Divine Spirit, a resonance that is unpredictable:
‘But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone.’
Why Should We Read Mary Oliver?
Mary Oliver looks at her thousand mornings as a gift. She partakes this task of reminiscence with an attitude of receptivity, truth and a plethora of indignations. Her poems offer a sanctity, almost directing you towards a ritual of writing. She talks about a solitary instant only to extend the ‘empty spaces/ of the wilderness.’ To discover her, you must perfect the Eye. It may just escape your senses as she warns :
‘Alas,
the good citizens of the commission
have never seen it,
whatever it is,
formless, yet palpable.
Very shining, very delicate.
Very rare.’
Her descriptive art is a linguistic euphemism, imagining life through the lens of her notebooks and scribbled ink. The ‘I’ of her poems is an experimentative self, returning repetitively to the patient observations and smallest teachings. She enjoins her readers with the experience that she had first-hand, but with a maxim that she never imposes. If you are not willing to perceive the snake of life with a ‘tongue like a smack of smoke’, then the only solution is to rise above the persecutions and borrow the momentous happiness with each passing hour:
‘If you like a prettiness,
don’t come here.
Look at pictures instead,
or wait for the daffodils.’
It is only with the mystery of the world that you can judge the art of miraculous living. Oliver circumscribes along that meandering path, eradicating any extraordinary happenstance that can draw upon her minute listening. She learns and unlearns as she navigates through and through, maintaining the voice of an artist who discovers her fertile road through the companions who make it possible for her to tread with them. It is never her will, which is at work here, but her ‘doing’ and ‘being’. She is disciplined in her routine, never missing a morning that pushes her towards her own self. It is her consciousness she plays with, but she bestows all her appreciation on the mindful nature that makes her way submersible in a poem. It would be wrongful to think she isn’t a creature of the world, for she reminds us to read the morning papers because ‘…by evening you know that you at least/ have lived through another day.’
