by Mary Oliver
I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader's part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight. (While one is luring the reader into the enclosure of serious subjects, pleasure is by no means an unimportant ingredient.)
"The Swan" has some of these qualities. It has as well a "secret" humor; I was watching geese not swans when I began the poem—that is, thought of the poem, felt it in concept, and wrote down a few lines. Since I had only recently written a poem about geese, I thought I would intensify the poem's display, and make something even fancier than wild geese out of the beautiful bird shapes I was watching. I thought this fairly funny, and I remember it was therefore with a certain light-hearted pleasure that I proceeded with the description. Though unknown as a fact to the reader, I don't wonder at all if my mood attuned me more finely than otherwise to my work—I am sure it did.
The form was no problem—long sentences on short lines, a little enjambment to keep things going (the swan is in motion) but not too much, so that the lines, like the swan's movements, are decisive, and keep their dignity. Take out some commas, for smoothness and because almost every poem in the universe moves too slowly. Then, once the "actual" is in place (in words), begin to address the reason for taking the reader's good and valuable time—invite the reader to want to do something beyond merely receiving beauty, and to configure in his or her own mind what that might be. Make sure there is nothing in the poem that would keep the reader from becoming the speaker of the poem. And, that's all. The final phrase—"touch the shore"—is vital; it is a closure yet it is also a moment of arrival, and therefore a possible new beginning.
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. My poems have all been written—if not finished at least started—somewhere out-of-doors: in the fields, on the shore, under the sky. They are not lectures. The point is not what the poet would make of the moment but what the reader would make of it. If the reader accepts and thinks about its question, "The Swan" accomplishes what it set out to do.
The Swan
Across the wide waters
something comes
floating—a slim
and delicate
ship, filled
with white flowers—
and it moves
on its miraculous muscles
as though time didn't exist,
as though bringing such gifts
to the dry shore
was a happiness
almost beyond bearing.
And now it turns its dark eyes,
it rearranges
the clouds of its wings,
it trails
an elaborate webbed foot,
the color of charcoal.
Soon it will be here.
Oh, what shall I do
when that poppy-colored beak
rests in my hand?
Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:
I miss my husbands company—
he is so often
in paradise.
Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those white wings
touch the shore?
Three Prose Poems
1
Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement—how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!
2
I was in the old burn-dump—no longer used—where the honeysuckle all summer is in a moist rage, willing it would seem to be enough to decorate the whole world. Here a pair of hummingbirds lived every summer, as if the only ones of their kind, in their own paradise at the side of the high road. On hot afternoons, beside the blackberry canes that rose thickly from that wrecked place, I strolled, and was almost always sure to see the male hummingbird on his favorite high perch, near the top of a wild cherry tree, looking out across his kingdom with bright eye and even brighter throat. And then, on the afternoon I am telling about, as he swung his head, there came out of the heavens an immense growl, of metal and energy, shoving and shrilling, boring through the air. And a plane, a black triangle, flew screaming from the horizon, heavy talons clenched and lumpy on its underside. Immediately: a suffering in the head, through the narrow-channeled ears. And I saw the small bird, in the sparkle of its tree, fling its green head sideways for the eye to see this hawk-bird, this nightmare pressing overhead. And, lo, the hummingbird cringed, it hugged itself to the limb, it hunkered, it quivered. It was God's gorgeous, flashing jewel: afraid.
All narrative is metaphor.
3
After the storm the ocean returned without fanfare to its old offices; the tide climbed onto the snow-covered shore and then receded; so there was the world: sky, water, the pale sand and, where the tide had reached that day's destination, the snow.
And this detail: the body of a duck, a golden-eye; and beside it one black-backed gull. In the body of the duck, among the breast feathers, a hole perhaps an inch across; the color within the hole a shouting red. And bend it as you might, nothing was to blame: storms must toss, and the great black-backed gawker must eat, and so on. It was merely a moment. The sun, angling out from the bunched clouds, cast one could easily imagine tenderly over the landscape its extraordinary light.
Moss
Maybe the idea of the world as flat isn't a tribal memory or an archetypal memory, but something far older—a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.
Memory of leaping or crawling or shrugging rootlet by rootlet forward, across the flatness of everything.
To perceive of the earth as round needed something else—standing up!—that hadn't yet happened.
What a wild family! Fox and giraffe and wart hog, of course. But these also: bodies like tiny strings, bodies like blades and blossoms! Cord grass, Christmas fern, soldier moss! And here comes grasshopper, all toes and knees and eyes, over the little mountains of the dust.
When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don't frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly,
sweet cousin.
Once
What is autobiography anyway but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, of who I am?
When the young deer hung herself on the fence, catching one foreleg in a loop of wire, and the rough farm dogs were running toward her, I knew the only things I could do: hide my eyes, or run. And I ran, faster than ever before in my life, and flung my body against hers, so that we were both pressed against the mesh of the fence while the dogs raced back and forth. But the deer did not know my meaning, or if she did she still could not tolerate my nearness; she hooted like a goat, and yanked her foot free, and dashed away into the woods.
A few days later, I saw her in a field. In spite of the beads of blood that were left on the fence where she had pulled her snagged foot free, she was fine, she was nimble and quick; she was beautiful.
And I thought: I shall remember this all my life. The peril, the running, the howling of the dogs, the smothering. Then the happiness—of action, of leaping. Then the green sweetness of distance. And the trees: their thickness and their compassion, all around.
The Whistler
All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than
thirty years she had not whistled. It was thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild and cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sound warbled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared.
Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling.
I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I've been living with for thirty years?
This clear, dark, lovely whistler?
PART TWO
Four Poets
The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe's Dream of Recapturing the Impossible
1
IN POE'S STORIES and poems we hear continually about compulsion, terrors loosed by the powerful upon the weak (or the powerful components of the mind upon the weak components of the mind); we hear about plague, and tortures, and revenge. But none of these elements does more than forward the real subject of Poe's work, which is the anguish of knowing nothing for sure about the construct of the universe, or about the existence of a moral order within it—anything that would clarify its seemingly total and imperial indifference toward individual destiny.
Poe is no different from any of us—we all choke in such vapors, somewhat, sometimes. A normal life includes the occasional black mood. But most of us have had some real enough experience with certainty, which helps us to sustain ourselves through passages of metaphysical gloom. While Poe had none. Not little, but none.
This lack disordered him. It is not a spiritual lack, but rather a lack of emotional organization, of confidence. And not self-confidence, which is already a complicated asset, but a lack of confidence in the world entire, and its benevolent as well as malevolent possibilities. In the deepest sense, Poe was without confidence in a future that might be different from the past. He was, forever, reliving an inescapable, original woe.
At the same time he was both a powerful constructor of narrative and a perfect acrobat of language. He was also a man of enormous courage. With almost superhuman will he wrote his poems and his stories—I almost want to say he wrote and rewrote his story and his poem—trying to solve the unsolvable and move on. But he never moved on. He never solved anything.
2
His mother, Eliza Poe, an actress, died when Edgar was two years old. She was twenty-four. It was a pitiful finish to a miserable story: Eliza Poe was penniless, consumptive, and abandoned by Edgar's father, whose occasional and itinerant occupation was also acting.
In Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza died, Poe was taken to live with the John Allan family, perhaps by the whim of Frances Allan, who had no children and had witnessed the death of Eliza. The relationship between Poe and John Allan, a successful merchant, was perpetually and mutually difficult. Though he took the family's name, Poe was never legally adopted.
Poe became friends with a woman named Jane Stanard, the mother of a schoolboy friend. She was a strange, closeted, not too steady figure. Even as their friendship deepened, Jane Stanard sickened, was declared insane, and died. Frances Allan also had never been robust. When Poe was twenty years old, and away from home, Frances Allan died. It was a separation without closure, since John Allan chose not to summon Poe home in time for a last meeting before the final and implacable silence of death.
In 1834, when he was twenty-five, Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm; she was thirteen years old. Does the future seem ensured? Eight years later, while Virginia was singing, blood began to run from her mouth. It was, it is fair to say, consumption. In 1847 Virginia died. She was twenty-five.
Poe had two years to live. With terrifying gusto, he drank his way through them.
In the Free Library of Philadelphia there is a portrait of the actress Eliza Poe. She is at once curiously stiff and visibly animated; her long black hair curls at the ends and frames the wide brow and the enormous dark eyes. The same dark curls, the same large eyes—in fact, a very similar white, low-bodiced dress—appear in another painting, this one in Richmond, of Frances Allan. And Virginia Clemm? She is described as having had a chalky white complexion, and long black hair, and a high, clear brow, and large eyes that grew even larger and ever more luminous during her illness.
To readers of Poe's poems and tales, it is an altogether familiar face:
The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets, now of a vivid yellow, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the melancholy of the countenance. ("Berenice")
I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead—it was faultless—how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine!—the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant, and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, "hyacinthine"! ("Ligeia")*
If the faces of Poe's women are often strikingly similar, other characteristics are no less consistent:
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand! ("To Helen")†
So Poe writes of that pale beauty—that Helen, who is also Lenore in "The Raven" and Eleonora in the story named for her. And the Lady Madeline in "The Fall of the House of Usher" comes from the grave "a lofty and enshrouded figure." And Ligeia "came and departed as a shadow." And her eyes were large—"far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race." There is not the briefest glimpse of Annabel Lee in the rhapsodic, death-soaked poem of that name, yet we know, don't we, what she must have looked like. Pale, dark-haired, with wide and luminous eyes—vivacious in the trembling, fragile way of mayflies. The narrator says of Berenice: "Oh, gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! oh, sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! Oh, Naiad among its fountains!" Of Eleonora: "like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die." Of Ligeia again: she has "the face of the water-nymph, that lives but an hour" and "the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk."
In Poe's stories overall, no focus is so constant as that of the face and, within the face, the look of the eyes. "The expression in the eyes of Ligeia!" the narrator cries aloud and, sacrificing the "blue-eyed Lady Rowena," wills the dead, dark-eyed Ligeia to return to him within the vehicle of Rowena's body. When the corpse stirs slowly and opens its eyes, he shrieks—of course it is the end of the story—"these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love."
Nothing, nothing in all the secret and beautiful and peaceful Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, where the narrator is but a boy and loves for the first time—nothing shines so brightly as the eyes of the first-beloved, Eleonora.
3
Said the poet Robert Frost, "We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes."* It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real, and desirable—that the child himself is real, and cherished. The look in the eyes of Poe's heroines—it is the same intensity, over and over, upon the long string of his many tales. It is the look that, briefly, begins to give such confidence—then fades.
Not in "Ligeia" and "Berenice" and "Eleonora" only, but in other stories too, the eye is a critical feature. In "The TellTale Heart," the narrator murders an old man of whom he is truly fond because of the blue veil that is a cast over one eye. "The vulture eye," he calls it.
Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees—very gradually—I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever.
It is a simple case. The eye that does not look back does not acknowledge. To Poe's narrator, it is unbearable.
The eyes o
f Augustus Bedloe, in "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," are
abnormally large, and round like those of a cat.... In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun.
Bedloe, otherwise a corpse-like figure, gains vigor through his daily use of morphine. He is, we understand, a man who is being medically supervised; he has even been hypnotized. He tells his story: one afternoon, in the mountains of Virginia, he breaks through the wall of time and place. "You will say now, of course, that I dreamed; but not so," he says. But his inexorable original fate, in the trivia of this new time and place, the Virginia wilderness, waits for him. He cannot escape it.