Response to Mary Oliver's "Blue Iris"

I was excited to step into the world of nature poetry this week, as we have primarily focused so far on prose in this class. Although I do not consider myself a poet, and I spend most of my time reading prose, I find certain poets and poetry moves me to understand writing on a different level, an often deeper and riskier level. Oliver succeeded in challenging my writing mind, and offered me beautiful language and images that I am still thinking about now.

I feel this collection of poems is an extremely important and influential work that all nature writers should read. While reading this collection, I felt like I had become the flowers, plants and animals, etc. I felt Oliver was talking to me, conversationally and endearingly. Although she does not always use the 2nd person, I think what made me feel this interaction was based on how she describes things. Many of her flowers and trees are personified, rendering the line in a human emotion and gradually merging the non-human with human. She “talks” to elements of the natural world as though they are god-like, spiritual teachers. Yet, what I find important is that she makes this human interaction a daily notion.

The themes that resonate most for me revolve around ideas of death, existentialism, interaction, observation, teaching, eternity, song, and light. I felt a constant warmth, or yellow golden light that pervaded the poems and provided a constant energy. Thinking back to these poems, I remember images described by shades of gold, amber, orange, yellow, and butter. They evoke a warm vitality. She focuses on turning the natural world into a school; she makes it about going into the classroom (the woods or fields) and learning from the teachers (flowers, plants, animals). What seems most important is that her readers see and ask questions of the natural world. That is where life is, that is where you learn about death. Oliver uses the life cycle of certain flowers to portray eternity. In “The Bleeding Heart” she talks of the bleeding-heart plant living on through many generations, past her grandmother, and budding during her own life. Here, the “hearts” connect the narrator to her grandmother, grounding themselves deep in the earth so that they may sprout once again each spring. She also talks about a “sense of ever-ness” in “Upstream,” a place where she recognizes the lasting power of smelling damp, fresh earth. It seems the everlasting is where the narrator wants her readers to find happiness.

Another constant theme is existentialism. Oliver often focuses on the “being” of flowers. It is as though she connects humans to flowers through the “souls” of being. One cannot truly know or feel nature unless they put themselves “in” it. In “Black Oaks” she writes “why don’t you get going? / For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. / And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists / of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, / I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.” It’s as though she wants to speak to every reader through her poetry by telling them to live like the flowers, to live humbly and attentively before we are gone forever.

Although I like many of the poems, one of my favorites is “Poppies.” I think this one spoke to me because I like how it contrasts the good with the bad. I like how Oliver introduces a negative or dark side into her bed of “yellow hairs” and “orange flares” and “spongy gold.” This realistic notion of the dark empowers her images of warmth, light, and happiness by contrasting them. I like how she portrays light as “an invitation to happiness”. Many of my most memorable experiences with the natural world have been watching the sun set at our cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is there where I see colors of the sun I have never seen before, colors that exude not only warmth, but like Oliver says, happiness and holiness. I remember sitting on the big rock in front of the cabin, looking out over the valleys, watching the light birth into the horizon and I, too, felt “washed and washed in the river of earthly delight.”