Mary Oliver's "In Blackwater Woods"

Thoughts on sentimentality.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

from American Primitive (Back Bay Books, 1983)

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I’ve been meaning to write about Mary Oliver’s work for awhile, but have put it off because, well, what can be said about Mary Oliver that has not been said before? And yet, her work has always been a kind of lodestone for me — there is the world you witness before you read Mary Oliver, and the world you witness after. The former is dim and slightly certain. The latter is something brimming and beautiful, haunted by mystery and grace. You feel that in this poem, where trees become “pillars // of light.” It’s like when I first read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and came across these sentences:

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for.

When you wander into that kind of unknowingness, it’s hard to find a way out. And maybe that’s the point. That there’s no way out. So you embrace what people have to say about mystery. Not long ago, I gave my dog-eared copy of Devotions, Mary Oliver’s selected poems, to the father of an old friend. It was his birthday, and after the party died down, and the relatives left, a few of us — my friend’s father, and us young companions — sat around the table and passed the book to one another, reading whatever poem began at the spot where our fingers found a page. It was a beautiful night, these words just floating in the lamp-lit room, the darkness outside. No one there would call themselves a poet except for me. And I loved that. I loved that there was room for poetry in the world outside of poetry. And I loved that the world outside of poetry was, in and of itself, full of poetry. It was one of those moments that reminded me that there is room for the romantic in this life, that there is something real to all this talk of souls and grace and light. That we are each expansive, and full of something more.

I’m thinking about that moment because, when I think of Mary Oliver’s work, I do think about romanticism, and I think about sentimentality. I don’t associate that word — sentimentality — with a negative connotation, but that has often been the case with it. And I don’t know when Mary Oliver’s poetry became associated with a negative connotation of sentimentality. Perhaps it has been always. I first became aware of it not long after a 2016 essay by Benjamin Myers published in First Things, which remarked: “Where an honest artist would labor to give us real dust, flowers, islands, and ice, Oliver has given us only placeholders, emotional signals for feelings unearned in the poem itself.”

“In this way,” the quote continues, “the feeling of the poem is out of proportion to its object.” Later, the author writes that sentimental writing is an enactment of a kind of thinking whose “denial comes most often in the form of a blindness to the particularity of creation.”

Though I disagree with this statement and the assumptions it presumes (and the ableism inherent in a word like blindness), it’s an essay worth reading if only, perhaps, to wrestle with the idea of sentimentality and its dangers, but it is an essay that most notably — by virtue of the subjectivity of its author — shows us the way that feeling, when offered in writing, is the riskiest and most humane kind of truth. The very immediacy of feeling, when written into a poem, forces the reader to confront humanity — as if they are settling in for a night alone only to hear a knock at the door. 

Mary Oliver’s poetry contains a great deal of sentiment. This is true. And it is the kind of sentiment that the reader, for lack of a better word, doesn’t always have to work for. The word used for this in Myers’ essay is “unearned.” There’s a meanness in such a word, I feel. Part of me thinks that saying that a feeling is unearned in a poem is almost akin to responding to someone’s I feel statement in real life by saying: no, you don’t feel that way. Yes, there are moral truisms throughout Oliver’s poetry. Revelations, too. And I guess I’ve always taken issue with a way of reading poetry that finds this objectionable on a fundamentally base level, as if forming some sort of universality out of the particular was a simplification rather than an attempt at generosity. I understand and love the impulse to write and read a poetry that obfuscates intentionally, that riddles or puzzles or overwhelms or underwhelms the reader in an attempt to ironize or criticize or confound or all such things or none such things. I guess I wonder...why not both? Or all?

I think of these lines from Ross Gay’s long and winding “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude”:

I am excitable.

I am sorry. I am grateful.

Such blunt statements give context to the swirl and scope of things, the way that a poem might meander simply because of feeling, and the way that, in the word meander, there is also the word mean — this endless attempt, so pure and so fair, at meaning.

I am only reading big books this year, in an attempt to really learn to spend quality time with a text. I kicked off the year with Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a big hearted, at times problematic, wild romp of a book that has something of the human condition on every page. Now, I’m in the dramatic and intimate throes of Middlemarch. I couldn’t imagine two different books. The former I read a mile a minute. It was a romantic rush. With Middlemarch, I manage maybe 15 or 20 pages an hour. It demands my attention and sometimes is truly and purposefully obfuscating (why, I wonder, is someone referred to by their surname and then their first name on the same page, when I never knew their first name to begin with!). But it yields moments of language and criticism and feeling that are gorgeous and prescient and also, at times, wholly universal. When I get a moment of George Eliot’s brain at work on the page, it’s so undeniably thrilling. It feels like an encounter I don’t deserve.

This makes me think of Jonathan Franzen’s I-assume-widely-taught essay “Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books.” In that essay, Franzen distinguishes between a Status Model and a Contract Model of reading. The former model occurs when one considers that “the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it's because the average reader is a philistine.” And the latter model occurs when one considers that “a novel deserves a reader's attention only as long as the author sustains the reader's trust.”

If I subscribe to Franzen’s model, Middlemarch feels much like the latter. There’s joy in the labor of reading it and joy in the payoff of that labor. I’m thinking of that now because of the way in which critics of Oliver’s sentimentality might argue that there is no labor in reading Oliver’s work — that there is only romance and aphorism and no earned appreciation. And yet, I wonder about something Franzen says later: “To serve the reader a fruitcake that you wouldn't eat yourself, to build the reader an uncomfortable house you wouldn't want to live in: this violates what seems to me the categorical imperative for any fiction writer.” There’s something about Oliver’s work that lets you know, almost intuitively, that she is living in the house she has built for you out of her poems. And that she is inviting you in — not to stay forever, but to stay for a little while, just to see what you make of it. And that’s why I love Mary Oliver, and why I love today’s poem. Because Mary Oliver is Mary Oliver, and you know, when you crack a book of hers open, that you’re apt to find the complicated world and the complicated heart rendered in generous and beautiful terms. That complication, that resistance to ease, is there in another poem of hers, “I Looked Up,” where she writes:

What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.

So much of today’s poem, I think, hinges on its first word:

Look

It’s with that word that Oliver calls you — yes, you, the reader — into the life of the poem, and it’s with that word that Oliver issues a command (I imagine a gentle one, but still a command) that you can accept or deny. To deny that word — Look — is to step away from the poem and ignore it. But to accept it is to imagine an outstretched hand pointing your gaze somewhere, and then to listen, too, as someone speaks what they feel is true about what they witness. And what I love about imagining that as the extended moment of reading this poem is that, after a certain point, the speaker moves from observation to narration — they begin to tell you about their life:

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this…

It’s at this moment that this poem becomes an act of deepened generosity. The opening stanzas of the poem are generous in the way that any act of detailed observation is generous. I’d give anything to hear a birdwatcher point out birds flying overhead, and offer me their names, and the ways to pick them out of the sky. But the instant that such a moment moves from observation to feeling is an instance of deepened generosity. It implies a sense of trust on the part of the speaker. When Oliver offers the first-person “I” over halfway through this poem, it communicates that trust. It’s as if the poem is saying: you have stayed with me this long, so let me tell you something about myself.

In some ways, this poem serves as a more communal cousin of an absolutely beloved poem by James Wright: “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” where the “I” is introduced quite early — in the first line — but instead of being an “I” of communality is rather an “I” of loneliness. The poem ends, quite famously:

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   

A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.

I have wasted my life.

In this way, the poem serves its purpose: it offers a portrait of a kind of pastoral loneliness as well as a loneliness of the soul — the loneliness of a singular person unable to find in nature the kind of communion that might allow them to transcend the systemic trappings and mechanical failings of the societal world. It is generous in that way, generous in its vulnerability, in its honest admission. It is a poem that communicates how asinine, sometimes, a poem can be. What good is a poem if it cannot make someone feel like they have un-wasted their life?

I feel Oliver’s poetry sometimes prodding at my defensiveness. When I am at my lowest and my worst, I find myself arguing back at her: how can you speak so truly about what you claim is a mystery? But then I see that maybe that is part of the point. To attempt some sort of meaning — as Oliver does at the end of this poem today — out of the grand and complicated spectacle of life is something that people try to do everyday, and something that many people do in abject and gross terms, in an attempt to ostracize rather than commune. But I feel in Oliver’s poetry an attempt toward meaning that allows for so much big-spirited openness rather than the opposite. It’s hard to grow angry at these final lines:

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Even if I found something to disagree with in these lines, my affront to such sentiment would not, I think, lead me to scorn it. I wonder sometimes if our tendency to police revelation in a poem — to gesture at what kind of revelation is allowed, and where it should come from, and how — says more about ourselves as readers than any poem’s craft. How does revelation happen? For me, it nearly always happens in some weird extended instant, when I witness something and an invisible set of gears turns in my head — the process of which I have never found out and have perhaps failed to replicate in a poem — and soon I am crying, or stumbling through my brain, trying to wonder how the sky above the water made me think about some mysterious truth. And sometimes this happens in a poem. Some line I just wrote, some image even, tumbles into the next line, and soon, as if by some odd hand, I am writing the universal into my very peculiar specific. And that’s one thing poetry does: it enacts our own unique stumbling and fumbling through the world.

All of this makes me think of music. I’ve been feeling nostalgic lately, listening to old Bright Eyes songs I used to cry to as a teenager. On the guitar or the piano, so many of those songs are constructed so simply — these basic chord progressions, maybe with a drop to the minor or a little walk down or up. But above that simplicity is something beautiful and specific — “When everything is lonely / I can be my own best friend / I get a coffee and a paper / Have my own conversations” — that gets into your ear and then your heart and never leaves you. Poetry is like that — altered layers of complexity and simplicity. The never wholly understandable world tried and tried again to be rendered into something digestible. But how simple can a mystery be? You can speak it plain but it’ll never be plain. And that’s part of the beauty, I guess.

I often think that critics of sentimentality are really critics of joy. This is a sentence that critics of sentimentality might scoff at. But what I mean is that there is some unsaid thing hanging in the air behind any critique of sentimentality, and it’s this idea that there is a real life that must be lived, one that is harsh and particular and absent of the seeming gloss of sentiment. But I think such a critique is sometimes the fault of the critic. I think it assumes too much. I think it assumes that the writer has not considered the complexities of life. I imagine that Mary Oliver would agree that life is very real, and very harsh, and very particular. In fact, in one poem, she writes:

And what did you think love would be like? A summer day? The brambles in their places, and the long stretches of mud?

Feeling is one of the lone truths we have as humans. Perhaps we would do well to listen both to poets who write into sentimentality and poets who attempt to obfuscate it. Either way, they are playing with those two words that introduce the most intense truths we can ever utter: I feel.

When I think of Mary Oliver, I think of the universal that comes by way of the specific. I think of the moments in my life when I have been struck in an instant when the world of nature and the world of feeling unite and become one indiscernible thing — when things can be both “cinnamon / and fulfillment.” That happens to me. Does it happen to you? When the capacity to describe merges with the capacity to feel, and the end result is just some emotion that is intangible but utterly alive? It’s in those moments — golden hour light shining upon a brick wall, maple tree standing alone in a field — that life feels like it might be able to described in something as true as a simply stated phrase, even though life feels so much bigger and more mysterious than that.

And when I think of Mary Oliver, I think of my old friend’s father, whose wife died a few years ago. I think of how their love while she was alive made me feel that real love was not just possible but beautiful. I think of how the way in which their love strengthened at the time of its imminent departure made me realize the way in which life, in general, is always about love, even in love’s most trying moments. And I think of that kitchen table, and us gathered around it. I think of that time, and how it existed simultaneously after grief, and among grief, and within grief. I think of how all of that is beyond simple metaphor. There is meaning “none of us will ever know.” And so, because of that, what else do we have but ourselves, and the language we make together? If we can bear a little longer, why not?