Poetry once again

Mary Oliver, 1935-2019

I think I've almost forgotten what I spent so many years teaching. For years, I spoonfed poetry into endless classes of college freshmen, urging them to appreciate the smell the roses so redolent in verse--Shakespeare to Frost to Koozer.

Then I retired and promptly forgot all that stuff. If I were to page through the last decade of blog posts, I'd find some poems--here and there Emily Dickinson, now and then someone else I'd stumble upon, and some from a few friends like Jean Janzen, Julia Kasdorf, Luci Shaw, Bob Siegel. But poetry has never been a steady diet; only rarely do I sit and read.

A former student messaged me yesterday, asked me which Mary Oliver book she should buy as a gift for her husband's birthday. As if I knew. I know Mary Oliver, know she's greatly loved by people I respect greatly, know she died just recently, know her penchant for the rich spirituality of little things, the glories of the natural world. But I don't really know her work.

So yesterday, having still not answered my ex-student's question, I googled Mary Oliver's poetry, and scolded myself for not doing what I told thousands of kids they should do--read poetry. This is the first Mary Oliver poem I found.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

The kind of epiphany she's describing is not some blinding Demascus Road discovery. "Finally" suggests the change of heart or mood or life that's about to happen is something you or I have considered for a long time--who knows how long? And it's not whimsy either. There are voices everywhere, reasons to fear walking away from what has been.

"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

Dependents are all around, so many or so weighty that something in you risks being lost in their needing. Pulling away is so difficult it sends us into depression. But the poem carries resolve--"You knew what you had to do." And interesting, isn't it?--her use of you? She's telling us something we already know. 

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

And we're not turning back--even though the path away isn't any easier to negotiate than the mess we've left behind.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,

The darkness doesn't stay. Even though it's night, somehow there's light, somehow there's stars. The burden we've left behind isn't as clear as what we're already only beginning to see.

and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,

that kept you company

Once again, she's telling us what she says we already know. This journey all past tense. It's something we know because it's something we all have done, maybe not just once either, maybe often. There were times we had to walk away or suffer the death of something more important. "You remember," she tells us-- and it's not a question. Remember how that went?--strength increasing, courage growing, resolution refashioning our own sense of who we are.

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world, determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

That's it. End of poem. End of story.

As it turns out, ourselves is all we have, she says, and you know it. The old moralist in me could spin all of this as idolatry, because the outline Mary Oliver traces in "The Journey" snubs your neighbor. That's what's left behind here when you walk away. 

But this isn't Sunday School. What Mary Oliver is describing is the discovery of the second half of the old biblical injunction--"love your neighbor as yourself." Mary Oliver's "Journey" is all about making sure the you each of us works with is sound and true and resolved. She's telling us what we already know but always to need to hear. She's making sure we remember that the only soul we can save is that one within ourselves. 

I think I'll tell that former student to buy Devotions, Mary Oliver's most recent collection. And I'll buy one too.