Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

by Mary Oliver

Everything in this book is true, in the autobiographical sense of the word. That is, I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memory.

No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

Whatever a house is to the heart and body of man—refuge, comfort, luxury—surely it is as much or more to the spirit. Think how often our dreams take place inside the houses of our imaginations! Sometimes these are fearful, gloomy, enclosed places. At other times they are bright and have many windows and are surrounded by gardens combed and invitational, or un-pathed and wild. Surely such houses appearing in our sleep-work represent the state of the soul, or, if you prefer it, the state of the mind. Real estate, in any case, is not the issue of dreams. The condition of our true and private self is what dreams are about. If you rise refreshed from a dream—a night’s settlement inside some house that has filled you with pleasure—you are doing okay. If you wake to the memory of squeezing confinement, rooms without air or light, a door difficult or impossible to open, a troubling disorganization or even wreckage inside, you are in trouble—with yourself. There are (dream) houses that pin themselves upon the windy porches of mountains, that open their own windows and summon in flocks of wild and colorful birds—and there are houses that hunker upon narrow ice floes adrift upon endless, dark waters; houses that creak, houses that sing; houses that will say nothing at all to you though you beg and plead all night for some answer to your vexing questions.

Still, in my personal life, I am often stricken with a wish to be beyond all that. I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.

Just where does self-awareness begin and end?

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.

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

All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.

YEARS AGO I set three “rules” for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose.

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.)

this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us. This is Poe’s real story. As it is ours.

biography must gather the facts as it can, then take the risk of summation.

But we would spend our time more profitably in the texts of his poems than in the chapters of his life.

The voice of Frost’s poems,

is the voice of a man who finds life a trial,

physical world handsome b...

finds no easy solution to his desire for solitude and his lon...

who finds no sweet that is not bond...

despair, wed to fortitude—is

the dense emotion at the center of Frosts work

lilting cadence,

wondrous restraint,

rich and re...

dark and...

Balance, restraint, steadiness, a controlled and reasonable tongue, and an eye that never fails to see the beauty of things whatever else it sees—these

This steadiness of design and sweetness of speech are Frost’s gift to us.

Frost’s prickly grief and his disconsolation must be added to them

Yes, one must embrace the darkness with the light to get all of Frost’s gift.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS’S

a poetry of rapture and pain, of the perfection of God and the awkwardnesses and imperfections of the poet.

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.

is in grace that one lives, or in hell—hell being, for a man of faith, that place, or those days, when the presence of God is withdrawn.

Hopkins’s nature was to live at either leaden depth or tumultuous height.

the wish to transcend the mere words that listed the earth-evidences of God, and to merge with him completely. Such is the fierce desire of the mystic—impossible,

nearness to God could be brought about by increasingly rigorous behavior, more prayer, more work, more abstinence. It was Loyola’s way, and Hopkins chose it, and it wore him to the bone.

William James

four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience.

Whitman

Leaves of Grass

a sense of mystical thickness and push, and a feeling that the inner man was at work under some exceptional excitement and compulsion.

it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud.

mystical states

illuminations, revelations . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after time“;

”cannot be sustained ...

mystic feels ”as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped an...

Leaves of Grass

invitation, to each of us, to change.