Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

Rain Soft as the Fall of Moccasins

By Robin Bates | Published: October 21, 2012

Describing the slaughter of the buffalo herds by whites, Mary Oliver draws on Sioux religion to imagine them as not altogether gone.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged buffalo, ghosts, Nature, nature religions, Sioux | Comments closed

The Silver Water Crushes Like Silk

By Robin Bates | Published: April 22, 2012

Although not explicitly religious, Mary Oliver has a Good Friday-Resurrection progression in many of her poems, including “Morning at Great Pond.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Egrets", "Fawn", "Morning at Great Pond", "Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church", Emily Dickinson, Harold Bloom | Comments closed

Far Off the Bells Rang through the Morning

By Robin Bates | Published: April 8, 2012

Mary Oliver finds Easter holiness in a new born fawn.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Fawn", Easter, Nature, Spirituality | Comments closed

Such Singing in the Wild Branches

By Robin Bates | Published: March 21, 2012

On a beautiful spring morning when she is startled by birdsong, Mary Oliver describes a merging with nature where she “began to understand what the bird was saying.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Spring", "Such Singing in the Wild Branches", Intimations of Immortality, Nature, William Wordsworth | Comments closed

The Black Honey of Summer

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2011

My son’s marriage proposal to his Trinidadian girlfriend has become bound up in my mind with a Mary Oliver poem about blackberries.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "August", Family, Food, Marriage | Comments closed

Nothing So Sensible as Sensual Inundation

By Robin Bates | Published: June 21, 2011

Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Plum Trees", Andrew Marvell, Food, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Sensuality, T. S. Eliot, To His Coy Mistress | Comments closed

I Weep for Adonais–He Is Dead

By Robin Bates | Published: April 7, 2011

When W. B. Yeat died on January 28, 1939, a despondent W. H. Auden wrote, “The day of his death was a dark cold day,” an instance of how we look to the weather for confirmation of our distress. The idea of a dying friend slipping away without leaving a trace is an unsettling one. Much better if the weather functions as a second witness, which it seems to do if it metaphorically expresses how we feel. When my good friend Alan Paskow died on Tuesday, I latched on to the fact that the day began with a tornado alert and that we were lashed by slashing rain for much of the morning.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Adonais, death and dying, elegy, Lost Children, Percy Shelley | Comments closed

Pretty Is Not What Blazes the Trail

By Robin Bates | Published: March 31, 2011

As the ice (or “iron rind”) starts dissolving from the ponds, we may dream of “ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding.” But the transition from winter to spring is a much grittier affair, characterized less by sweetness and more by lurid smells emerging from chilling mud. The real harbinger of spring may not be the bluebird but the skunk cabbage, celebrated by Mary Oliver in a powerful poem.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Skunk Cabbage", "Spring", Nature | Comments closed

A Place of Parched and Broken Trees

By Robin Bates | Published: March 27, 2011

My friend Alan Paskow is finally dying. The poem that comes to mind is Mary Oliver’s “Universal Hospital, Boston.” All around nature is thriving, a contrast with the clean antiseptic rooms within the hospital. The contrast shows up as well in the patient’s eyes, which “are sometimes green and sometimes gray,/and sometimes full of humor, but often not.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "University Hospital Boston", death and dying | Comments closed

Tag Archives: Mary Oliver

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