The Wisdom Of Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver was magic! The raw nature of her poetry struck a deep chord within so many. After news of her death in 2018, tributes from readers poured in on social media, with people recalling what her poems meant to them. In many ways, what she expressed in her poetry was what so many of us wanted to be able to speak about openly, but felt like it would not be welcomed as it would appear too dark.
I personally adore her for writing about death and mourning in such a beautiful and honest way. She understood that there is just as much beauty in death as there is in living. She had a reverence for the natural world and frank, but comfortable descriptions of mourning.
Some of my favorite notable passages are below.
“Love Sorrow”
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
“When Death Comes”
When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
“In Blackwater Woods”
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
“No Voyage”
O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.
“The Uses of Sorrow”
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
“The Veil”
There are moments when the veil seems
almost to lift, and we understand what
the earth is meant to mean to us — the
trees in their docility, the hills in
their patience, the flowers and the
vines in their wild, sweet vitality.
Then the Word is within us, and the
Book is put away.
“Ocean”
I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.
– Mary Oliver
