|
|
Post by Gerry on Jan 20, 2019 22:05:29 GMT -5
Mary Oliver will be missed, and she was one of the premier American poets and surely one of our finest nature poets. I know many of you are Oliver fans, so I'm keen to hear your thoughts about Oliver and this poem.
|
|
linm
Junior Member
Posts: 92 
|
Post by linm on Jan 22, 2019 13:03:00 GMT -5
One thing I noticed about Oliver's poem is that it seems to come to a turn after the fox's death is described, and the poet starts to sum up: "...that way died/ But I know...."(stz.5-6). I felt the poem ending there, but it doesn't--it turns again, "But what happened is this..." and the poem moves a great distance through the speaker's imagined death to a view of eternity. To me there's a final turn in stanzas 13-14 that brings in a new vision. The poem reminded me of Doty's use of the display of Mackerel to come to terms with a different "afterlife." But I also see something of the same pattern, of the poem seeming to come to a close early, then turn and push on. In stanzas 9-10, the jeweler metaphor prompts a turn from the mackerel to us, "Suppose we could iridesce . . . " But the poem doesn't end; the metaphor gives way to considering consciousness itself and proposes a mass eternity, with a new turn in the last two stanzas.
I find an element of magic in Oliver's poem, also, almost a ghost story undertone belied by the stately pacing and tone; she sees the fox, emulates its behavior, identifies /unites with it to understand it, but then, it goes too far, and she dies, and sees the afterlife. The tone is matter-of-fact, but it's a terrifying scenario-- though of course she is really still alive to report back to us in a poem.
There's a lot of subtle sound play also. I notice near or off-rhymes in many places: road/ know (3); chin/rim (4); wheel/fields/ (5); down/spine (9). "Wheel" and "world" are both used three times; "what" (2x) and "when" (3x) are repeated, "why" said only once. There's "that way died," and "made me want"; and of course the final line contains the fabulous image, "watchmen of the night." There's "fox" and "foxes," "for years," "myself" "fields" and in the last stnz "stars stepped forth" and "fires."
Another underlying image /transmutation I see here is that of seeing /watching. She sees the fox, which "look(s) out over the fields"; then she emulates it, and then she also "looked out / into the wide fields" (10). She sees the fox vanish, she continues to watch, then the stars become "hot hard/ watchmen of the night." It's beautifully rounded off, but also eerie-- consciousness, manifested in "seeing," becomes the object of an impersonal guardian sight.
Oliver's poems, like Bishop's, are deceptively simple.
|
|
|
|
Post by bluebird on Jan 23, 2019 12:24:55 GMT -5
Thinking more about why the last stanza did not appeal to me:
-For me "appointed fires" made me think of employees, those "assigned" or "designated" to perform certain duties.
-the idea of stars as watchmen for me conjured night watchmen, armed guards outside warehouses, museums, industrial
sites...employed to protect against invasion, thieves or despoilers.
-that they are hot and hard watchmen makes them feel masculine...not so much "angelic" guardians but more like
bouncers at a back alley bar...
-so it seemed to me that stars were armed with search lights, guarding the night, the darkness and perhaps even
secrets of the Almighty, the creator of the universe and so owner of all the real-estate...
-the romantic in me still feels as though heavenly bodies protect us ... that they are more angelic guardians
than watchmen. I balked at this last stanza because it felt jarring, took me to a place I didn't want or expect to go...
and in my worst imagination made me think of such gatekeepers as protectors of the whatever wisdom burns in the
fires of hell. I realize that this is a very personal reaction and perhaps way off base.
-and it brought to mind the reality that the stars are really most likely light traveling from distant and long dead
celestial bodies
I wonder how it was the Mary Oliver, as a 12 year old girl, was able to take up residence in the home of the deceased
Edna St. Vincent Millay and was given the task of going through that poets private papers. How many of us get that
kind of opportunity? Elite; 1. BEST OR MOST SKILLED MEMBER OF A GIVEN SOCIAL GROUP; 2. A SMALL AND
PRIVILEGED GROUP. That is what I was trying to make note of. As class divisions become ever more evident in our
democracy it becomes more and more difficult for outsiders to get a foothold and easier and easier for
children of the already successful to be given opportunity. The most distressing part of this is that those born
with advantages often have zero ability to understand the amount of effort it takes to make "a heap of heap" and so,
often as not, do not experience empathy to balance their inherited sense of superiority.
|
|
|
|
Post by betsey on Jan 23, 2019 18:06:30 GMT -5
Karen - I still don't see elitism in Mary Oliver. True, she made a lot of money writing poems (some critics are jealous, I'm sure) But she was such a recluse, rarely gave interviews, etc. She did not address her horrible childhood much (four poems); maybe she escaped to nature. She was white, gay, successful (a best seller! How many poets are? Her success astonished her. Her major marketer was Molly, however, not her.) Forgive me for getting defensive the other night. I don't love all her stuff either - much repeats and is perhaps one animal too far for me (fox?) but I think I was feeling her loss, and I do love many of her poems (mostly early ones, in fact.) I saw in the notes you were playing Devil's Advocate (a voice I like to take on as well), and you did get a rise out of me! All good, actually.
Now on to the fox!
Such spare, uncomplicated lines and thinking. But layered.
Interesting to look at the pronouns - "it" morphs from speaker to fox to wheel to poet, to darkness, death. "I don't know" and "I know" playing off against each other. Mary Oliver as master storyteller.
I find the syntax interesting. "It was I who was leaving" "But what happened is this" "That day was done with." All passive voice, all the verb "to be" (we are schooled to avoid "to be," right?.) This poem is being done to her, she is not doing. (Which, of course, is how death behaves.) I heard echos of Dickinson as well, "Because I could not stop for death... Hence the watchmen, eternity, the "fires" on their own line (inferno, perhaps? Hell and Heaven juxtaposed?)
This is a rather grim poem in that respect. The epiphany, woman becomes fox, becomes death itself, burns with the stars. "It grows dark."
When you look through the eye of another, the other vanishes. Hmm.
Also interesting about the song - wanting to sing but unable to sing (alive, dead, known and not known -- the play of opposits)
Good stuff!
|
|
|
|
Post by bluebird on Jan 23, 2019 19:17:14 GMT -5
Thanks Betsey for realizing that I was playing Devil's Advocate. I actually love Oliver's work for the most part wishing only that she'd left a tiny
corner of the topic for others of us who are basically pantheists as well. Also, I am super sensitive right now, dealing with the approaching death of
my dear old hound AND the death of one of my best friends...both from incurable cancer...so I'm a little overwhelmed right now and defensive. Sorry.
I like your point that when you look through the eyes of the "other" the other vanishes...that is an interesting observation. Something to think about
how we become the "other" and take them over as ourselves in a way is something I had not though about so thanks for that.
|
|
|
|
Post by betsey on Jan 23, 2019 21:26:46 GMT -5
Oh Karen, sorry you are in a vulnerable spot(s) now. Hang in there.
|
|
Jimmy
New Member
Posts: 44 
|
Post by Jimmy on Jan 23, 2019 21:47:34 GMT -5
Something about this poem that works formally is its voice. The immediacy of it starting right off with “I found a dead fox” draws you in. Soon, she moves on to humility by stating the obvious fact that she doesn’t know the circumstances. Then she wants to sing a “sweet” song about the fox’s perseverance and hopefulness. By now, as a reader I trust her and am feeling the admiration/compassion she expresses for the fox. I think that is why I totally buy the narrative of her climbing in that wheel and touching the fox. Which is crucial and difficult to pull off. Who knows if she really did it? By then in the poem, who cares? I’ve concluded the speaker in the poem is Oliver as a young girl who could actually fit in a tractor wheel. That helped but I really bought it anyway. Oliver’s poetry is filled with examples of her close encounters with the wild. So much so in fact that her speakers, having crossed certain boundaries and become wild themselves, experience extraordinary epiphanies.
This brings me to what I think is the major device of this poem - the vanishing fox. This is both believable and surprising. Believable because haven’t we all recoiled when touching something forbidden? Doesn’t anything dead have a certain magical quality to it? If we touch such things, don’t we wonder intensely, and without knowing, what will really happen? Still, as readers we are not expecting such a sudden plunge. The line break between fox and vanished enacts this wonderfully. The vanishing fox transforms the poem’s tone from one of sentimentality to one of experience. Without the fox in her view, the speaker suddenly faces her own mortality. I love how the poem’s enjambed line breaks maintain tension throughout the poem, a tension that is corralled in the next to last stanza’s three hard stopped sentences.
And now the final stanza. What a troublesome few lines! For me, the poem at this point dissolves into total understandable mystery. I feel what it is saying on several levels but can’t hardly put any of it into words. First, the word “appointed” suggests the star image is just a charade, something we can use to fool ourselves there is order and beauty in the world. That line for me has a cynical tone. The next two lines leave me breathless. The sound of “hot, hard” is almost submissive from the reader’s perspective. I feel like they are slapping me as I read them. The “a” in watchmen rhymes with hot to tie the two together. They line’s rhythm sounds almost like a march and I feel the imperial agents of darkness taking over. I sense the speaker submitting to them too. Yet, the fact that death, darkness and stars are presented as metaphor suggests that those stark realities can be mitigated by art.
I loved this fascinating poem!
|
|
Jimmy
New Member
Posts: 44
|
Post by Jimmy on Jan 24, 2019 7:08:57 GMT -5
I just realized this, too: she isn’t able at first to sing about the fox but in the end she does sing a very different kind of song than what she intended. This in a away enacts the process of discovery in writing poems!
|
|
|
|
Post by lildawnrae on Jan 24, 2019 13:48:06 GMT -5
I think the idea of the other vanishing is the way the physical world works. Every thing we know or see, we know from the state of our bodies. Simply I'm cool, I think you must need a sweater. We can imagine the other, but it's still our own bodies we experience. For me, the end of the poem celebrates this paradox. We can imagine that wild physical world with extreme empathy, metaphor, whatever our attempt to bridge the gap between us and the other it might be. At that point we're bounced back into our natural solitary state.
I think the sense of mortality (I who was leaving) gives this poem extra power. There's no imagined life beyond this one. The stars are hot but emotionally cold. The universe is "appointed" which I think means orderly, but it isn't kind.
|
|
|
|
Post by Gerry on Jan 24, 2019 14:01:50 GMT -5
Jimmy, yes, the poem is a "sweet song" but not about the fox's perseverance. Yet, by singing it, the fox perseveres.
|
|
|
|
Post by Gerry on Jan 24, 2019 14:05:15 GMT -5
I think it's easy to read Oliver's reclusivity as a kind of elitism.
I want to say something about the phrase ""appointed fires" in the last stanza; it should be noted that the one who "appoints" them is the poet. Can we read this poem, based on her desire to sing a song for the fox, as a kind of ars poetica, as poem about writing poems? Consider: we find something in the natural world--in this case, a dead fox--and then we attempt to touch it; this doesn't have to be a physical contact, but the psychic contact of metaphor, etc.
|
|
