Mary Oliver was perhaps the most beloved American poet since Robert Frost, whose nature-centered poems continue to reverberate.
Oliver’s gifts were different from Frost’s. She rarely pursued the subtle symbolism beneath his seemingly familiar surfaces or the double meanings hidden within his plain diction. Yet we continue to read her for a similar invitation: to find rest, not among our busy fellows, absorbed in the pursuit of the volatile, but in nature’s quietude—the bubbling stream, the scurrying chipmunk, the scent of pine, the intricate tapestry of a snowflake.
As always when I read her, a quiet solace takes hold. I grow tranquil, reminded that contentment is found not in possessions but in nature’s moods, even its thunder—in the sense that I, too, belong to something larger than myself, a continuity that neither time nor circumstance can annul.
My childhood returns: memories of a pine-scented grove, a whispering wind, a fox moving silently through the brush.
A few moments ago, I read an Oliver poem I had somehow missed, despite having read much of her work. It’s “What Can I Say,” one of her final poems, included in “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.”
Once again, she beckons us to immerse ourselves in nature’s quiet wonders, to gather its gifts, and to discover grace by accepting its rhythms.
Her poems never insist; they invite. They ask us to linger long enough for the ordinary to become luminous.
Nature still speaks, if we’ll but listen. As Oliver reminds us, “the leaf is singing still.”:
“What Can I Say”
What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story
and you are somewhere in it
and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the
chamber of commerce
but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you
were a child
is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four,
and the leaf is singing still.
—rj
Brimmings: up from the well 