Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

by Mary Oliver

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.

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.

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.)

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. Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those white wings touch the shore?

do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen.

In 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 called: happiness. This is called: stay away from me with your inches, and your savings accounts, and your plums in a jar. Your definitive anything. And if life is so various, so shifting, what could we possibly say of death, that black leaf, that has in it any believable finality?

Try to live through one day believing nothing is significant, nothing is governed by the unknowable, the divine. See how you feel by the end of such a day.

In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.

You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.

There is nothing so special in this, I know. Neither does it prove anything. But living like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I am sensual in order to be spiritual. I look into everything without cutting into anything. And then I come home and M. says—she always says it!— How was it? The answer has never varied or been less than spontaneous: It was wonderful.

The whirlwind of human behavior is not to be set aside.

how shall there be redemption and resurrection unless there has been a great sorrow? And isn’t struggle and rising the real work of our lives?

This is the lesson of age—events pass, things change, trauma fades, good fortune rises, fades, rises again but different. Whereas what happens when one is twenty, as I remember it, happens forever.

Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement?