Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

by Mary Oliver

He is beyond what he believed himself to be.

I imagine it from boards of a certain breadth and length, and nails, and all in cheerful response to some need I have or think I have, aligned with a space I see as opportunistic.

Plywood I had no love of, though I took it when found and used it when I could, knowing it was no real thing, and alien to the weather, and apt to parch and swell, or buckle, or

I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.

It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course, that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.

But when I do not, I hold an angry weasel in my hand.

In the woods, fallen branches of oak, of maple, of the dear, wind-worn pines. They lie on the ground and do nothing. They are travelers on the way to oblivion.

The blue butterflies, called azures, twinkle up from the secret place where they have been waiting. In their small blue dresses they float among the branches, they come close to me, one rests for a moment on my wrist. They do not recognize me as anything very different from this enfoldment of leaves, this wind-roarer, this wooden palace lying down, now, upon the earth, like anything heavy, and happy, and full of sunlight, and half asleep.

FOR SOME YEARS NOW I have eaten almost no meat. Though, occasionally, I crave it. It is a continually interesting subject of deep ambiguity. The poet Shelley believed his body would at last be the total and docile servant of his intellect if he ate nothing but leaves and fruit—and I am devoted to Shelley. But I am devoted to Nature too, and to consider Nature without this appetite—this other-creature-consuming appetite—is to look with shut eyes upon the miraculous interchange that makes things work, that causes one thing to nurture another, that creates the future out of the past.

There are other interrupters, far craftier than I. Whether the turtles come through sunlight or, as is more likely, under the moon’s cool but sufficient light, raccoons follow. The turtles are scarcely done, scarcely gone, before the raccoons set their noses to the ground, and sniff, and discover, and dig, and devour, with rapacious and happy satisfaction. And still, every year, there are turtles enough in the ponds. As there are raccoons enough, sleeping the afternoons away high in the leafy trees.

She sees me, and does not move. The eyes, though they throw small light, are deeply alive and watchful. If she had to die in this hour and for this enterprise, she would, without hesitation. She would slide from life into death, still with that pin of light in each uncordial eye, intense and as loyal to the pumping of breath as anything in this world.

I know that appetite is one of the gods, with a rough and savage face, but a god all the same.

Teilhard de Chardin says somewhere that man’s most agonizing spiritual dilemma is his necessity for food, with its unavoidable attachments to suffering. Who would disagree.

Not the point. They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful. A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley’s, like Thoreau’s, cry out: Change! Change! But most don’t say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.

I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight.

Of course! the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. It’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly, sweet cousin.

His enterprise is to challenge and dissolve a particular fact or circumstance that represents the natural order of things—specifically, deaths irreversibility. He therefore seeks to understand the world in a way that will disprove such circumstance. Discovering a “different” world assumes experiencing manifestations of that different world. To begin, then, it is necessary to disassociate from the world as it is ordinarily experienced. And, not casually. He must unstring the universe to its farthest planet and star, and restring it in another way.

“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,” the narrator says in “Eleonora.”

IN THE LYRICAL POEMS of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong, a dissatisfaction or distress. The poet attempts an explanation and a correction. He is not successful. But he has, often in metaphoric language, named whatever it is that disquiets him. At the same time, in the same passages, the poem is so pleasant—so very pleasant—to read or to hear. In fact we are hearing two different messages: everything is all right, say the meter and the rhyme; everything is not all right, say the words. This makes of the poem a complex discourse, although it is not felt to be so by the general public, who hear and feel more emphatically than they comprehend. Frost, it is believed by the thousands who love his work, is easily understandable; he is clear, musical, and bittersweet; in poem after poem he is felt to be rejoicing, if in a rather sad way, over the affairs of the world, especially the natural world.

It is as though Frost felt himself obliged, as a public man, to display a reasonable cheerfulness, whatever he felt privately.

The poet is haunted by: the road not taken, the restlessness of the rooted trees, the quick descent of natures gold, the peril of the runaway colt playing on the snowy hills, the desire for respite in the world of “easy wind and downy flake.”

Yes, one must embrace the darkness with the light to get all of Frost’s gift. For it seems he could not hear the trill of the trees without the cry of the root, or see the golden leaves but with the sign of their death nearby, or witness easy wind and downy flake apart from the huge, cold, indifferent gears of nature spewing them out.

IN GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’S world of Christian faith and Jesuit rigor there exists always the incomparable gift of Christ’s love and sacrifice; it is the model for everything. And there is also ever present the story of Mary: her mercy and her power of intercession. Between these two presences Hopkins’s poems praise and leap, praise and shiver, praise and kneel, praise and self-condemn. It is a poetry of rapture and pain, of the perfection of God and the awkwardnesses and imperfections of the poet.

The truth of the matter is that the poems do not require half the explanation Hopkins gave them, and to tell a further truth, he elaborates in such detail that it becomes finally obstacle rather than assistance.

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour. . . .

But my point is not simply that Hopkins found it difficult; rather, that in such a severe “program” of religious life there was every indication that nearness to God could be brought about by increasingly rigorous behavior, more prayer, more work, more abstinence.

He could only summon, suggest, question, call, and plead. And Leaves of Grass is indeed a sermon, a manifesto, a Utopian document, a social contract, a political statement, an invitation, to each of us, to change.

There is a madness born of too much light, and Whitman was not after madness nor even recklessness, but the tranquility of affinity and function. He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.

What is called definitive is, right away, a brag.

What men build, in the name of security, is built of straw.

Spring: there rises up from the earth such a blazing sweetness it fills you, thank God, with disorder.

When I write about nature directly, or refer to it, here are some things I don’t mean, and a few I do. I don’t mean nature as ornamental, however scalloped and glowing it may be. I don’t mean nature as useful to man if that possibility of utility takes from an object its own inherent value. Or, even, diminishes it. I don’t mean nature as calamity, as vista, as vacation or recreation. I don’t mean landscapes in which we find rest and pleasure—although we do—so much as I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as a mystery, a mystery that entails other privileges besides our own—and also, therefore, a hierarchy of right and wrong behaviors pertaining to that mystery, diminishing it or defending it.

The man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness shrinks beneath our unkindnesses and our indifference. Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form.

Then comes evil, crossing the street, going out of its way with determined steps and a face like a nail—invasive, wanting to molest, to hurt, to stain, to dismay, to dishearten. This is no discourse, I have not even the beginnings of sufficient knowledge to hunt down the reasons why. I suppose they, those lives soaked in evil, are miserable and so they ever despise happiness. I suppose they feel powerless and therefore must exert power wherever they can, which is so often upon those unable to comprehend what is happening, much less defend themselves.