Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992)
Mary Oliver is an American poet of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who drew great inspiration from long, solitary walks in the countryside or in the wild. In her collection, New and Selected Poems, Volume One (1992), she celebrates the value of becoming close to nature, seeing this as having intrinsic worth and as enriching the soul. Her poems reflect the satisfactions of a mostly solitary life enriched by her encounters with nature and the stimulation of her imagination when encountering nature.
Although her solitary walks may traverse familiar territory, she shows a capacity to appreciate something new in her surroundings on each occasion. She exhibits a sense of awe, affection, and wonder in the presence of nature and invites others to do the same. She sees nature as enriching, and sometimes as a tonic for the trials and tribulations of life. She also sees humans as part of nature and part of the grand cycle of life, which includes both life and death, eating and being eaten. In this regard, she often imbues her poems about nature with a sense of the spirituality and mystery found in religion.
As a lesbian and survivor of child abuse, Mary Oliver tends to identify with outsiders and social misfits and she uses her poetry to counsel others to find solace in their experiences with the natural world and to use these experiences to appreciate their rightful place in this diverse panoply of life. Readers can draw inspiration from, for example, elegant water birds who are happy in their existence and content with their place in the world. Mary Oliver created her own world in her poetic imagination and found great satisfaction in it so she recommends to others that they do the same. Many of her poems convey optimism and transcendence.
Mary Oliver also uses her poetry to invite her readers to look at familiar, ordinary, or overlooked things in new and more appreciative ways, whether it is a reclusive starfish in a coastal rock pool or the dark, still surface of a lake at dawn. Readers are invited to see what she sees through her eyes and to experience what she experiences through her feelings.
To Mary Oliver, one does not have to go too far to appreciate nature. Much of it is all around you, accessible on the outskirts of town.
To make her poems more accessible, Mary Oliver uses simpler language, writes in free verse, and employs strikingly unusual, attention-grabbing metaphors and similes.
Mary Oliver’s nature worship draws heavily on the attitudes of romantic poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like William Wordsworth. To some extent, her work represents a continuation of their literary tradition.
In addition to nature worship and showing empathy for social outsiders, Mary Oliver embraces causes that complement her romanticism. This is evident in her extolling the virtues of the ‘noble savage’, the Indigenous tribal people of America who lived in harmony with nature. She also embraces wildlife preservation, lamenting the rapacious attitudes of white settlers in the American West and their exploitation of the environment that saw, among other things, the near extinction of the once great buffalo herds. This means that, by implication, she denounces the colonialism practiced by people of her own race and presents herself as an exception to them.
Student resources by Dr Mark Lopez
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The purpose of the concise notes of Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell is to provide much needed help to students seeking to unlock the meaning of the texts with which they have to deal. (More elaborate notes are provided in lessons as part of my private tutoring business.)
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