Passing the Unworked Field
Queen Anne's lace
a hardly
prized but
all the same it isn't
idle look
how it
stands straight on its
thin stems how it
scrubs its white faces
with the
rays of the sun how it
makes all the
loveliness
it can.
Is it a poem? I don't know, but this little Mary Oliver verse joyfully honors a countryside weed, Queen Anne's Lace. The same way sunflowers and, well, dandelions brandish beauty, Queen Anne's Lace can't but help but be noticed, even when they're all over, abundantly invasive, and barely tolerated, "hardly prized," Oliver says-- deliberate understatement.
But then, without motion or intent or our regard, the stuff prospers, even here in this "unworked field": "Look/how it/stands straight/on its thin stems. . ." Despised by some, perhaps, but firm in some mysterious inner resolve.
Three functions she celebrates: its rigor, its clean white faces, its sheer loveliness, despite its, well, weediness. Its charm is revealed in its insistence on being beautiful. Doggone it--Queen Anne's Lace is a weed, a curse, brome grass with a splashy, phony crown. As if it understands its own meagerness however, Queen Anne's Lace refuses to retreat: "look. . .how it. . ./makes all the/loveliness/it can."
Mary Oliver isn't telling you or me to work hard at being good or gorgeous. She's allowing Queen Anne's Lace to inspire whoever cares to bother to admire what's here, even in an "unworked field." Beauty is all around us, even in our ditches. Call it a pest, call it a weed, call it somehow noxious, it stands tall and straight and bright and beautiful. "Consider the lilies," the Bible says somewhere, "they toil not, neither do they spin."
In this fresh, little poem of hers, Mary Oliver returns to the fields she frequently works herself by doing nothing less or more than considering the Queen Anne's Lace--and then smiling, something that really shouldn't be so hard to do.
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