Let’s face it—there’s just no good that ever comes with a hurricane. Or a tornado or tsunami or earthquake or wildfire or mass shooter or cruel despot. Yes, there’s a provocative philosophical argument to be made about whether the latter two of those belong on a list of the so-called “natural” phenomena that precede it, but let’s hold that aside for now to affirm the larger point that human suffering, particularly on a mass, out-of-the-blue scale, is always tragic and unwelcome.
Which is different, however, than saying, “No good can ever come from or be revealed and expressed by tragedy.”
We might remember in this context Mr. Rogers’s soothing advice to children who have witnessed terrible public calamities: “Watch all the people running to help!”
Did Oliver and her poetry avoid the shadows cast down like outsized redwoods when the natural world rears up and lays waste to all that is before it?
No, neither nature nor God nor people can prevent tragedy from occurring, but where is the notion of godliness itself if not in the seemingly human, natural urge to assist when our neighbors suffer a cruel, undeserved assault on their well-being? Or when we ourselves examine some wreckage that has befallen us and slowly, over time, come to realize that in some ways, bitterly ironic or not, something good has seemed to or may yet emerge from it?
Into the breach of this and other questions revolving around life and death and all the days in between stepped the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019). Oliver’s adoration of the natural world was so complete and self-immersive that she was sometimes criticized for being overly sentimental and rapturous about the basic state of nature, which is itself unfeeling and just as prone to turn on humans as invite them into its embrace.
Did Oliver and her poetry avoid the shadows cast down like outsized redwoods when the natural world rears up and lays waste to all that is before it? There’s some evidence for this, including a biographical fact from her intentionally and exceedingly private life. In a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver for “O” magazine, she revealed for the first time that she had been sexually abused by her father as a child. Little wonder that she sought escape from that particular hell in the woods and mountains and cabins where she came to feel most at home.
The question various critics have raised is whether in her poetry of almost relentless wonder and amazement at all things that simply are, did she—and do we in reading her work?—succumb too readily to breezy reframings of just how awful the natural world can also be, not even to mention the murderous strongmen and thugs dead set on destroying anyone obstructing their will to power? Notably, Oliver’s poetry almost never touches on political or cultural issues.
Let’s take a look at her poem “Hurricane,” which gets us mulling those themes in a mere 27 lines of the everyday language pushed to the rhapsodic peaks that helped make Oliver into a kind of secular priestess for those more inclined to spend Sundays hiking or picking their way along rugged shorelines than beholding the stained glass windows rising above the pews of a favorite church.
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HURRICANE
By Mary Oliver
It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.
—From the volume, “A Thousand Mornings” (2012)
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“Unbelievable!” That’s the most common go-to for anyone trying to accept and comprehend the enormity of a cataclysmic natural event. The winds, the waves, the fireballs, the ground splitting and earth trembling under us. The normal order of things has been shaken, the illusion of any such order unmasked.
Oliver notes this with her opening line of “It”—that awful intrusive force—misbehaving (like some rebellious child!) in a way that one could not previously have imagined. It’s the kind of sentiment that speaks volumes about our capacity—though is it a need?—to ignore the fact that disaster is an all-too-regular occurrence in life, and it is only by ardent, perhaps self-preservationist denial that we manage to forget that such things can happen anywhere, anytime.
Not, surely, in our town, our house, our family, our way of life.
But of course it does—exactly what privilege should we be granted to sidestep the giant cosmic game of chance that rules so many matters in this world?
And when it does, we had better believe it.
So the unprecedented rain falls, the trees bend, and Oliver takes a moment—but only a moment—to turn inward and reflect on a particular emotional storm in her own life, which “lasted longer” than the storm she is witnessing and when, “I felt my own leaves giving up and/falling.”
It’s a rare biographical reference for Oliver, and she leaves it behind as quickly as she came to it, not affording us any particulars as she pivots to, “But listen now to what happened/to the actual trees.”
And here is where she brings us back to her perennial themes: that life is an amazement unto itself, that new life is forever bursting forth from the old, that no matter how crushing any given blow, give it a season or two and life—trees, leaves, our hearts—push new life out from “stubbed limbs.”
It is just the way of things, how life itself wants to, is commanded and programmed, to be.
Is that too much Pollyanna, too much searching for gold nuggets amidst rubble?
Well, Oliver seems to have a lot of evidence behind her argument, and it’s not like she doesn’t see—with a kind of reverential awe—just how destructive natural forces can be. She notes not once, but twice, for emphasis—once for the natural world, once for her internal one—the flat declarative: “The back of the hand to/everything.”
Ouch!
Fellow poet Mark Doty (featured in this space five years ago today), offers a telling line on this matter in Contemporary Poetry Review: “Oliver’s nature is never sentimentalized. The world is gorgeous but not pretty.”
From that unpretty place, she chooses also to note and honor the life force that serves as a kind of foundation for resilience, a resilience that is no less available and powerful for people as it is for trees.
No, neither trees nor people will be assured of coming back “whole” in a purely material sense. All will die eventually. And if they do survive tragedy, they may come out looking stubby or bent or missing a limb or some foliage. They may resemble telephone poles and be beyond caring that they do (fine guidance for humans there).
But when blossoms appear, maybe misshapen and out of season, Oliver leaves no doubt that our best course is to marvel at the season they have chosen, and note it for the seasons and hurricanes of our own lives that may not fit “anything we had ever imagined” before.
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Storm by Ilona Froehlich https://unsplash.com/@julilona
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Forest path by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
None of us can avoid natural disasters. In 1960, I lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. On September 13th, Donna, a category 4 hurricane, skirted by our home with winds up to 80 mph. It left its fingerprints throughout Boston. Branches, just birthing fall colors, surrendered to winter’s gray. Two weeks later, Ted Williams, the Splendid Splinter, retired. Talk about a double whammy. Thankfully, this bad was short-lived. In November, joy returned to the city. Massachusetts’ junior senator was elected President, but that exuberance lasted a mere 30-days. A nor-easter slammed into Boston just before Santa’s visit. Good for children building snowmen, but not so for adults driving cars. When the family returned to Carlinville, Illinois in 1962, a tornado hit Gillespie, a town just five miles away. Gotta move again. The Golden State awaited us. I hoped the move to L.A would be a breath of fresh air; Afterall, the St; Louis Cardinals had Ernie Broglio on the mound, and the Dodgers had Sandy Koufax. Unfortunately, eye-burning smog put a damper on my anticipated fresh air. Years later, marriage and three children necessitated a move from a Venice apartment to a house in Northridge. On January 17th, 1994, a 6.7 earthquake woke us up in pre-dawn darkness. Its epicenter–Northridge. Surprisingly. the damage was minimal. A decade after that quake shook, another transplant, Valencia, a hop-skip-and jump from Northridge became my new zip code. Nature decided to give us one hot welcome. A deadly fire broke out on the drought-ridden mountains above our home. God or some other higher force intervened, and Its flames never reached us. But my wife missed her family who lived in the Houston area. We hit the road again like Willie Nerlson. Houston’s cool summers, lite skeeters and progressive politics appealed to us. Then, barely unpacked, Hurricane Harvey arrived, dumping almost 60 inches of rain upon us. Slanting rain and unyielding winds uprooted trees, orphaning most of their leaves. However, unlike Mary Oliver’s trees, ours never bloomed. I blame Texas. Will we find greener pastures soon? Who knows. Oh, by the way, Trump was inaugurated that year.
Remind me never to follow in any of your wakes, Robert! Glad, at least, that you’re still upright, like Mary O’s leafless telephone pole trees…
A beautiful piece Andrew!
Acutely observed as well as sympathetic!
I appreciate this in the muggy and hot Sunday morning we have.
You have me thinking about when I write positive and uplifting pieces and when I am sometimes compelled, deeply compelled, to write about painful things!
I sure prefer the positive!
Thanks!!!!
That painful-positive axis has had me in a dither these past few years in particular, Meggan, so I’m glad you brought this up. If I let myself, I could sink way down into the poli sci part of me and just bang away on the keyboard every day decrying the state of things; there’s certainly no shortage of emotion or material in that sphere. So it can sometimes take a particular effort of the will to just enjoy life, and to write about things that bring joy—one of which is….writing about joy! (Interesting circularity to that dynamic…) All of which is different than the more timeless existential pain points that enter every life. It’s complicated!
I liked the way Mary O. balanced those forces in this poem; it must’ve been what appealed to me when I came across it, even though I don’t think I was consciously processing that at the time. Thanks for helping me do so.
Now in my mid-seventies I didn’t anticipate the decided increase in sad and tragic news involving friends and loved ones (I’m categorizing the ravages of disease and aging as natural disasters here). Hardly a week or a month passes without news of a death, or pending chemotherapy treatment, or disabling and life changing accidents. it has become an increasing challenge not to dwell on the fear and dread of the destructive (or at least debilitating) forces of nature’s course over time. It takes no small amount of effort and resilience to push on and to tap the well of gratitude for all that is good.
Andrew, thanks for your great analysis of this wonderful Mary Oliver poem.
In his book-length essay He Held Radical Light poet Christian Wiman devotes a chapter to the transformation of his opinion about Oliver and her poetry.
(By the way, Wiman has been battling a rare, incurable blood cancer for more than a decade, has had two bone marrow transplants, and nearly died several times. Talk about a hurricane that lasts longer. He explores all this in My Bright Abyss, where he reflects on his spiritual journey in light of his illness – and on poetry that helps illuminate his way.)
Back to Radical Light, where he recounts a warm, funny, very human encounter with Oliver when, as editor of Poetry, he is charged with introducing her at a public reading and celebration of her work – work about which he says he had once written “a blistering critique.” He closes the chapter with “White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field,” another poem of hers that obliterates the notion that, as you say some critics allege, she “and her poetry avoid the shadows” of the natural world. This poem is full of shadows, but they’re all blinding white and scalding light.
White Owl Flies Into and Out of the Field
Coming down out of the freezing sky
with its depths of light,
like an angel, or a Buddha with wings,
it was beautiful, and accurate,
striking the snow and whoever was there
with a force that left the imprint
of the tips of its wings – five feet apart –
and the grabbing thrust of its feet,
and the indentation of what had been runnig
through the white valleys of the snow –
and then it rose, gracefully,
and flew back to the frozen marshes
to lurk there, like a little lighthouse,
in the blue shadows –
so I thought:
maybe death isn’t darkness, after all,
but so much light wrapping itself around us –
as soft as feathers –
that we are instantly weary of looking, and looking,
and shut our eyes, not without amazement,
and let ourselves be carried,
as through the translucence of mica,
to the river that is without the least dapple or shadow,
that is nothing but light – scalding, aortal light –
in which we are washed and washed
out of our bones.
Jay, just the other day, dealing with one death and another severe decline of friends now grown elderly, a younger 30s-ish friend inquired how I was doing with so much recent loss. Had to ponder that for a bit, but finally responded that despite spending seemingly my entire adult life thinking about, researching, and writing about mortality, I was not prepared, because one truly can’t be, I have concluded, for what it would actually feel like to come to this age and begin losing my friend & acquaintance circle at such a rapid and regular pace that I can’t quite quite digest it all. What once made one gasp—”What, he died???”—has now come to feel depressingly regular, conveyed on a seemingly weekly basis, like those long lists of casualties the defense department churns in a hot war. No amount of intellectual awareness of mortality can approximate the heaviness that comes with that experience, even as we’re left with no other real choice but to honor our dead and then move on with the living.
David, so glad you responded to this, for many reasons, chief among them I was not familiar with that “White Owl…” poem, which really should put to rest any complaint that Oliver did not readily enough acknowledge the essential brutality that lies right at the heart of nature, right alongside all its beauty. This poem captures those dual realities in an almost breathtaking way. Also very glad for the Christian Wiman reference, yet another commonality for us, “My Bright Abyss” having come up for attention two days from today’s date, a full 13 years ago now (my, how time does indeed fly…).
https://andrewhidas.com/?s=christian+wiman+my+bright+abyss
I think I’d come across Wiman’s previous antipathy to Oliver and had a feel for why, given that his own poetry is decidedly more opaque and inscrutable than Oliver’s “saying-what-she-means-and-meaning-what-she-says” style, which is usually decipherable upon first read. That plays out for me in realizing that I HAVE to read Wiman’s poems multiple times to begin appreciating them, but I WANT to read Oliver’s multiple times in order to bathe again in their bliss. For all that, I give him major props for coming around on Oliver, and also, of course, for his heroic battle with his medical condition, and the beautiful prose he has conjured to describe how it has affected the way he lives.