How can we ‘mend’ our lives? By ignoring the ‘bad advice’ the strident voices around us provide, and trusting our instinct, because, deep down, we already know what we have to do. This is a poem about undertaking the difficult but rewarding journey of saving the one person you can save: yourself. Let’s conclude this selection of Mary Oliver’s best poems with one of her best-known and best-loved: ‘The Journey’. (It’s a cliché that writers use even their sorrows for inspiration, turning the worst moments of their lives into something positive – but this poem puts such a sentiment more lyrically and memorably.)
The shortest poem on this list, running to just four short, accessible lines of verse, ‘The Uses of Sorrow’ once again provides us with a concrete image for an abstract emotion: here, sorrow, rather than joy.Īnd sorrow is a box full of darkness, given to the poet – for this, too, she realises, is a ‘gift’. Eternity, Oliver asserts, is a ‘possibility’, but this is a poem more concerned with living a curious life now, in this one guaranteed life we have. But although ‘joy’, the subject of ‘Don’t Hesitate’, is an abstraction, Oliver wonderfully pins it down here, acknowledging its potential for abundance or ‘plenty’ and telling us that joy was not meant to be a mere ‘crumb’.īeginning with a string of similes to describe the threatening and fearsome idea of approaching death, this poem develops into a plea for curiosity in the face of death and what might come next. This short poem is unlike many of the poems mentioned so far in that it is not a nature poem at all, but a poem which deals in the abstract. Once again, Oliver takes us into particular moments, specific encounters with nature which surprise and arrest us. It then transpires that the speaker is referring to a specific grasshopper, which is eating sugar out of her hand at that precise moment. This is another Mary Oliver poem which begins with a question, although here is has the feel of a catechism: who made the world, the swan, the black bear, and the grasshopper, the speaker asks? But that enriches the poem, rather than diluting its subject-matter. In many ways, this poem is as much about the poet as it is about the fish. Here, Oliver once again yokes together human feeling with her observations of nature, as the dogfish tear open ‘the soft basins of water’.
So many modern nature poets have written well about fish, whether it’s Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’ or Ted Hughes’ ‘Pike’, to name just two famous examples.
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