The widely cherished American poet Mary Oliver died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-three. The poems she published in The New Yorker exemplify the themes and modes for which her work is best known, often addressing the awe of the natural world with studious lucidity, seeking—and finding—the sacred in communion with the commonplace.
Oliver’s earliest contributions to the magazine, “Mushrooms” and “First Snow”—both of which appear in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, “American Primitive”—infuse vital imagery with the imminent, and immanent, promise of oblivion. The fungi of the former are memento mori, “red and yellow skulls,” “shark-white death angels”: “to eat / is to stagger down,” to live also to die, as the mushrooms—“when they are done being perfect”—“slide back under the shining / fields of rain.” In the latter, snow’s “white / rhetoric,” “calling us back to why, how, / whence such beauty and what the meaning,” is a vibrant force, “an energy it seemed / would never ebb, never settle,” after whose end the “silence / is immense.” The titular predator of “White Owl Flies Into and Out Of the Field,” from 1989, might be a metaphor for Oliver’s own poetry—“beautiful / and accurate”—inspiring speculation that “maybe death / isn’t darkness, after all, / but so much light / wrapping itself around us.” The poet’s deep identification with her subjects—even, and perhaps especially, those not human—provides a path to transcendence, however temporary: “I have almost vanished / into the body of the dolphin,” she writes in “One Hundred White-Sided Dolphins On a Summer Day,” “into the moon-eye of God, / into the white fan that lies at the bottom of the sea / with everything / that ever was, or ever will be.”
Although “an ecstatic poet,” as Ruth Franklin writes, in her 2017 review of Oliver’s “Devotions,” “the question that seems to drive just about all Oliver’s work” is one of practical philosophy: “How are we to live?” For moral instruction, too, Oliver turns to nature, as in “Crows,” from 2000. “They don’t envy anyone or anything—,” Oliver observes; “Why should they? / The wind is their friend, the least tree is home. / Nor is melody, they have discovered, necessary.” The birds, “as cheerful as saints, or thieves of the small job / who have been, one more night, successful,” lead the speaker to self-reflection: “Should I have led a more simple life? / Have my ambitions been worthy? / Has the wind, for years, been talking to me as well?” And, although, as Franklin points out, “she offers her readers a spiritual release,” Oliver resists easy answers, preferring to inhabit a space of ambivalence, unknowing. “After all / what is Nature, it isn’t / kindness, it isn’t unkindness,” she muses in “Early Snow,” from 2001—and, in 2004’s “Daisies”:
“What do I know,” Oliver asks (without a question mark), “But this: it is heaven itself to take what is given, / to see what is plain.” What is plain to the poet may not be to others, but no matter: “Some things, say the wise ones who know everything, / are not living. I say, / You live your life your way and leave me alone.” Whatever Oliver sets her attention to becomes alive, because it becomes a part of her life, which is a part of all life. “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” Franklin quotes, and Oliver’s model for devotion is elemental: “But water is a question, so many living things in it, / but what is it itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming // generosity, how can they write you out?” Generosity, here, is essential to life—and what is attention if not a form of giving? Oliver’s final poem to run in The New Yorker—the only one to take place entirely indoors—is titled “Oxygen.” “Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even, / while it calls the earth its home, the soul,” that poem begins, and ends:
