Sunday – Easter
For many Easter posts in the past, I have shared poems by Mary Oliver, thinking that I was finding a resurrection message from a poet who didn’t seem to me to be particularly religious. Only later did I learn that Oliver was an Episcopalian and that I wasn’t reading too much into her when I would read the road to Calvary in a poem like “Egrets” (“Finally I could not save my arms from the thorns”) or “Swamp” (“My bones knock together at the pale joints, trying for foothold, fingerhold, mindhold over such slick crossings”). Resurrection imagery, meanwhile, appears in poems like “The Fish,” where she describe life following a death:
Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
Like Emily Dickinson, Oliver sometimes keeps the Sabbath by walking in nature rather than going to church, but the Easter message runs through much of her poetry. Think of that as you read “Swan,” with the white cross of the bird “streaming across the sky.”
Incidentally, it’s possible that Oliver here is alluding to Christopher Marlowe’s “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament” in Doctor Faustus, which Edith Sitwell also does in her own crucifixion poem “Still Falls the Rain.” The line “did you feel it, in your heart?” also brings to mind Wordsworth’s “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;/ And passing even into my purer mind,” which is how recalling a visit to the Wye River affects him.
In her encounter with the swan, Oliver says the wings are like “the stretching light of the river.” At such moments, we are called upon to reflect on the meaning of beauty in the world. Are we ready to change our lives?
Or as she puts it at the end of “Morning at Great Pond,”
[Y]ou’re healed then
from the night, your heart
wants more, you’re ready
to rise and look!
to hurry anywhere!
to believe in everything.
As I say, Easter messages pervade Oliver’s poetry.
The Swan
By Mary OliverDid you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,
like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light
of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
