by Mary Oliver
When I came to a teachable age, I was, as most youngsters are, directed toward the acquisition of knowledge, meaning not so much ideas but demonstrated facts. Education as I knew it was made up of such a preestablished collection of certainties.
Knowledge has entertained me and it has shaped me and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions. Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the recognition of the spiritual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state. I am not talking about having faith necessarily, although one hopes to. What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude. Such interest nourishes me beyond the finest compendium of facts. In my mind now, in any comparison of demonstrated truths and unproven but vivid intuitions, the truths lose.
I would therefore write a kind of elemental poetry that doesn't just avoid indoors but doesn't even see the doors that lead inward—to laboratories, to textbooks, to knowledge. I would not talk about the wind, and the oak tree, and the leaf on the oak tree, but on their behalf. I would talk about the owl and the thunderworm and the daffodil and the red-spotted newt as a company of spirits, as well as bodies. I would say that the fox stepping out over the snow has nerves as fine as mine, and a better courage. I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.
I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other's destiny.
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We hear on the forecast that it may snow, or it may rain, and there will be high wind. Certainly there is wind. The rest passes out to sea, but the wind is sufficient. Clap of invisible hands and all the winds together, those breezy brothers, they are on their way.
The storm comes on an incoming tide; it therefore grows in power for the six hours of flashing tumble and shove toward us. The wind is from the south-southwest. The fetch, then—that length of open water in the path of the storm—is the distance of the bay, across the water. A distance great enough to roughen even the basins of the ocean waters here, and to swell mightily the power of the waves. Indeed, what such fetch and wind in the rising tide do to the water of the surface is beautiful and dreadful. It shines, for the clouds are thin and racing by, and the light alters from gray to steel to a terrible flashing, a shirred, swarming surface. Sometimes, in summer, the water seems not only to catch and reprise the sun's light, but to contain light of its own making, that rises from below. Not now. Now it is all darkness that rises, to meet this frieze of surface waves, the random creases and spreads of light. It is sharp, it is painfully bright, mirror bright, mercurial and flowing and molten. What could live, now, in the interpourings below, or on the raked surface? The eiders, hour after hour, bounce and dive and emerge with small fish and crabs. For them the roughness means disruption below, in which many nourishing tidbits may be found—crabs risen from the sand, fish separated from their tumbling schools. The eiders' high-set eyes are cheerful. The black ducks, though, that love sunshine and low tide, have vanished. And most of the gulls, those that still coast by, are in some peril, for they must aim through the wind; pull as they may on their strong wings, they cannot plow a chosen way, but must sink and dodge the black rocks of the groins, and the roofs of the buildings nearest the water.
The wind pounds. It can't be pounding, there is nothing to pound, no opposition, just molten slabs of water as ocean rolls its bales of brightness to the shore where they smash hugely, row after row. Yet it is the pounding of the wind that one hears. Fences creak and flap, doorways whistle, loose objects thump down or fly off porches, or roll down beach. But the noise of loosening and rolling is as nothing compared to the outpouring, the lashing and whistling from both above and below, ocean and sky-loft both. It is a many-layered choir; the sopranos shriek, the altos follow in disharmony, the chesty tenors and baritones fling out their notes of brass. The basses make great black O's of their lips, and simply, unceasingly, exhale. The ranks of the waves—dark, white-bearded, and sand-filled as they roll in their turn up the beach and toward us—never hurry, never hesitate, never stop coming. For hours it continues: still dreadful, still beautiful. It is frightening too, fraught with peril for anything so minor as a house, or so breakable as a human person.
Sometimes the surface takes on a tarnished glow, as it heaves and throws the white spume skyward. One could be standing in the same place, by the same sea, a thousand years ago. In spite of the motion and the noise, that glow releases something strangely peaceful. It is not unlike the calm that one reaches in the deepest influence of great art, where the spirit senses that purest of mysteries: power without anger, injury without malice. For nature and art are in this way twins: they are both beautiful, and dreadful, and in love with change.
Then, it is close to high tide. A small blue boat appears, bumping the sea wall. A forlorn sight. One can hardly believe it is inanimate, it seems to strive so against collision, and to wince with each knock of the waves that sends it roughly against the wall. The bow turns and turns, as if in an effort to escape. It is swamped, and without hope. We could go out and perhaps get our hands on the dragging line. But we could not hold it against the storms force. It lurches on, the west wind wild behind as it pitches to the east, bumping and bumping against the sea wall. Then it is out of sight.
Then the sea, at crest, a full flood, lifts itself; it flies, it enters the yard. Like long great silver draperies, with wide pleats opening and sizzling, the waves rise and shake themselves in bright flounces over the sea wall. The water is so loaded with sand that with each vanishing of the fallen wave the yard appears newly made. The sprawled waves erase all history—footprints, dog tracks, litter—it is all scoured and laid over with the cleanest grains.
So, at the sixth hour, the ocean arrives—and soaked the roses, and flung spray to the deck, and then it said, Not this time, and, still screaming, but with each wave a less dreadful scream, it began fo descend.
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So the storm passed, that one.
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Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few friends, books, my dogs, all things peaceful, ready for meditation and industry—if for no other reason than to escape the heart-jamming damages and discouragements of the worlds mean spirits. But, no use. Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world. The whirlwind of human behavior is not to be set aside.
Now comes a peaceful day, all day long. Then comes evil, crossing the street, going out of its way with determined steps and a face like a nail—invasive, wanting to molest, to hurt, to stain, to dismay, to dishearten. This is no discourse, I have not even the beginnings of sufficient knowledge to hunt down the reasons why. I suppose they, those lives soaked in evil, are miserable and so they ever despise happiness. I suppose they feel powerless and therefore must exert power wherever they can, which is so often upon those unable to comprehend what is happening, much less defend themselves.
Where does such a force come from? What does it mean? A voice very faint, and inside me, offers a possibility: how shall there be redemption and resurrection unless there has been a great sorrow? And isn't struggle and rising the real work of our lives? Maybe in ten more years I will have another idea. Meanwhile I know this: evil is one part of our beautiful world. And though my writing pays it small attention, I am not blinkered; I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have
felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective.
Though I do—oh yes I do—believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope!
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"Put yourself in the way of grace," says a friend of ours, who is a monk, and a bishop; and he smiles his floating and shining smile.
And truly, can there be a subject of more interest to each of us than whether or not grace exists, and the soul? And, consequent upon the existence of the soul, a whole landscape of incorruptible forces, perhaps even a source, an almost palpably suggested second universe? A world that is incomprehensible through reason?
To believe in the soul—to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view—imagine the consequences! How far-reaching, and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon the instant, only half the world!
How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul—in mine, and yours, and the blue-jay's, and the pilot whale's. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely.
The wild waste spaces of the sea, and the pale dunes with one hawk hanging in the wind, they are for me the formal spaces that, in a liturgy, are taken up by prayer, song, sermon, silence, homily, scripture, the architecture of the church itself.
And as with prayer, which is a dipping of oneself toward the light, there is a consequence of attentiveness to the grass itself, and the sky itself, and to the floating bird. I too leave the fret and enclosure of my own life. I too dip myself toward the immeasurable.
Now winter, the winter I am writing about, begins to ease. And what, if anything, has been determined, selected, nailed down? This is the lesson of age—events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever. I have not been twenty for a long time! The sun rolls toward the north and I feel, gratefully, its brightness flaming up once more. Somewhere in the world the misery we can do nothing about yet goes on. Somewhere the words I will write down next year, and the next, are drifting into the wind, out of the ornate pods of the weeds of the Provincelands.
Once I went into the woods to find an almost unfindable bird, a blue grosbeak. And I found it: a rough, deep blue, almost black, with heavy beak; it was plucking one by one the humped, pale green caterpillars from the leaves of a thick green tree. Then it vanished into the shadows of the leaves and, in the same moment, from the crown of the tree flew a western bluebird—little aqua thrush of the mountains, hundreds of miles from its home. It is a moment hard to top—but, I can. Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?
Now the green ocean begins to take on the hue and cry of its sheets of spring blue. Weary and sleepy, winter slowly polishes the moon through the long nights, then recedes to the north, its body thinning and melting, like a bundle of old riddles left, one more year, unanswered.
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Acknowledgments
I thank the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which some of these poems and essays have been printed:
Appalachia, a section of Winter Hours
Green Mountains Review, Moss
Ohio Review, Sister Turtle, and The Bright Eyes of Eleonora: Poe's Dream of Recapturing the Impossible
Poetry, The Storm
Poetry East, The Swan (essay)
Shenandoah, Building the House
Virginia Quarterly Review, Three Prose Poems
Sister Turtle also appears in The Anchor Essay Annual: The Best of 1998, published by Anchor Books/Doubleday.
Building the House also appears in The Best American Essays 1998, published by Houghton Mifflin.
The Swan (poem) appears in my book House of Light. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Oliver. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston.
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*A11 quotations are taken from The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Modern Library, 1992).
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†All italics in quotations are mine.
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* Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), p. 742.
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*One would like to say, Here, at least, he could relax. But "relax" is far too free and easy a word ever to use with Hopkins.
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*From The Varieties of Religious Experience, in William James: Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987). The particular phrases quoted can be found on pp. 343-344.
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†Ibid., p. 357.
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*The number of pages devoted to this poem in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982).
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*Poem length is taken from the volume previously cited.
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*The first three "Sand Dabs" are in two previous books, Blue Pastures and West Wind. The sand dab is a small, bony, not very significant but well-put-together fish.
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*Probably Theridium tepidariorum.
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