Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

by Mary Oliver

scutes, as they are called—the individual shingles that cover the raw bone of the shell.

(turtles)

For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly.

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 ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader’s part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight. (While one is luring the reader into the enclosure of serious subjects, pleasure is by no means an unimportant ingredient.)

IN The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience. The first of these is that such an experience “defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.”

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

I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.

Sweet Emerson—always passionate about ideas, always reasonable about passion.

The world is made up of cats, and cattle, and fenceposts! A chair is alive. The blue bowl of the pond, and the blue bowl on the table, that holds six apples, are all animate, and have spirits. The coat, the paper clip, the shovel, as well as the lively rain-dappled grass, and the thrush singing his gladness, and the rain itself. What are divisions for, if you look into it, but to lay out a stratification—that is, to suggest where an appreciative or not so appreciative response is proper, to each of the many parts of our indivisible world?

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.

Sometimes I think, were I just a little rougher made, I would go altogether to the woods—to my work entirely, and solitude, a few friends, books, my dogs, all things peaceful, ready for meditation and industry—if for no other reason than to escape the heart-jamming damages and discouragements of the worlds mean spirits. But, no use. Even the most solitudinous of us is communal by habit, and indeed by commitment to the bravest of our dreams, which is to make a moral world.