Mary Oliver

“A Wild Night, and the Road Full of Fallen Branches and Stones” An Analysis of

Mary Oliver’s Life and Poetry

     The nature poet Mary Oliver once said “Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” Her poetry clearly reflects this free-thinking, carpe diem attitude. Mary Oliver’s poetry deals with natural themes that have messages to human society, which is caused by her turbulent childhood, her choice to remain isolated from society, and her relationship with her family.

Mary Oliver’s poetry is influenced by her turbulent childhood, which was filled with sexual abuse, a secluded, rural environment, and her difficult relationship with her parents. Mary Oliver tells Maria Shriver in an interview for The Oprah Magazine “That's why I wanted to be invisible” (Oliver Interview, 2011). Oliver was sexually abused as a child and it made her draw into herself, and want to become invisible, which made it easier for her to notice things about humans and nature.  Her ability to notice certain things, especially on her walks in the woods, helped Oliver write her poems, which have undercurrent themes of messages to the human race about empathy and life. When asked by Maria Shriver about her childhood, Oliver answered “I spent… time…. walking around the woods” (Oliver Interview, 2011). Oliver lived in a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, which helped her connect with nature, and she then used the natural inspiration to write her poems. The quiet environment Oliver grew up in is perfect for her poems because the atmosphere was good for her to focus and the nature helped her create poems about human nature and the natural world. Oliver tells Shriver about her family and their relationships by saying “I didn't get sufficient mother-love and protection” (Oliver, 2011). Oliver’s lack of a good family relationship helped her write her poems because it forced her to be by herself and take long walks into the forest. Not only did her walks help her connect to nature and inspire her poems, but her difficult home life helped her understand basic human nature and how animals and humans are so different, and how humans can be very cruel. These clearly show how her turbulent childhood and her long walks influenced Mary Oliver to write her poetry.

     The extent of wars, battles, movements for independence and the push for freedom during Mary Oliver’s lifetime influenced her poetry and helped her with her themes of human nature.  Growing up, Oliver dealt with the Holocaust and “the murder of approximately six million Jews”(ushmm.com). The difficult topic of Nazis and the Holocaust happened when Oliver was under a decade old, so she grew up in a world filled with pain, and she had direct access to the root of human nature and the ability of society to be cruel and filled with hate. This allowed Oliver to create contrast between her peaceful suburban world to the war raging outside, which helped her get to the root of society’s deepest secrets and write about them in a simplified way by using nature. Around the time Oliver published her first book, America was in the center of the Civil Rights Movement, “a period of moral crisis” (M.L. King). The war for freedom in her own country forced Oliver to dwell on the idea of basic human rights, and the right to be part of a country. This influenced her poetry by helping her understand how people are cruel, and how the animals and the forest she loved are so different from the human world, where people treat each other horribly, and helped her explain this to other people through the metaphors of nature. For eight decades in and around Mary Oliver’s lifetime there were been many African countries gaining their freedom, and as Nelson Mandela said “Africans require, want... independence”(Brainy Quote). The concept of fighting for freedom after everything Oliver had experienced was new for her and helped create new ideas for her to write about. The new ideas of fighting for oneself and sticking up for ones beliefs created a new aspect for Oliver and helped her in both her writing and in her life because until that moment she had only heard of giving up, but now she realized the importance of fighting. The power of the people that Oliver grew up with and the strength that she saw in the fights for independence help Mary Oliver write poems about human nature.

     Oliver’s poems are focused around themes involving nature, but have an underlying theme of human society, which stemmed from her childhood and her society growing up. Oliver describes her father in her poem, “The Visitor,” as “pathetic and hollow”(23) and with “the meanness gone”(26). The contrast Oliver sets up between her past with her father and her description of him being sickly helps the reader better understand why she liked the woods better than her house and why she preferred to write nature poems with underlying themes of human decisions because of her dislike of her father and her subconscious decision to help herself understand why his personality was like it was.  Oliver’s poetry is based off of the roots of human nature and what it really means to live and be free, but her poetry came from her unhappy childhood which shaped her writing because she subconsciously wanted to discover why her parents treated her like she was unimportant, and she did that by creating metaphors between her natural world and the human world where she grew up seeing humans being cruel to one another. In Oliver’s poem, “Knife,” she describes a rock with words like “sheer, dense wall of blind stone”(29) and then she describes a bird with the word “dazzling”(27). Oliver creates contrast in her work by using juxtaposition in words like blind and dazzling which helps the reader better understand Oliver’s view of the human world versus the animal world because she views the human society as cruel but in the animal world all of the animals are equal. The contrast she sees in the world helps her improve her writing because it helps to create a metaphor for the human world and the natural world which helps the reader better understand why Oliver writes about nature. In her poem “Peonies,” Oliver describes the flowers as “wild and perfect” (35) and says they know how to live “before they are nothing, forever” (36). The carpe-diem attitude Oliver adopts for this poem is different than some of her other poems because it is happier and helps the reader better understand why Oliver chooses to write about nature because of the  beauty she sees in the flowers in her garden is so different than the horridness of some of the human society. The notion of living while you can is made into a metaphor by Oliver which helps the reader better understand that Oliver is trying to create a simpler way to understand the concept of carpe diem. When Mary Oliver said her quote about surviving versus living, she was one person who perfectly understand it because of her range of experience in her life, which influences her poetry and helps her to be inspired.