“Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” (2012), Mary Oliver

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do

if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?

So let us go on, cheerfully enough,
this and every crisping day,

though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.

I know we are not quite there (September equinox is still 3 weeks away), but the changing weather and the increasing presence of undergrads on campus makes it feel like it’s practically November already and autumn always makes me think about Mary Oliver (b. 1935). To be perfectly honest, it makes me think of the incredibly popular “Wild Geese” (1986). But as much as I love it as a poem about how to find place in the world as a gay poet, everyone’s heard that one before and heard it as a sample of a kind of appealing yet unsatisfying sentimental spirituality which over time almost taints and cheapens the poem. This is not to say I don’t like sentimental poetry, check out the rest of this blog! But, I think Mary Oliver’s poems in many ways defy the small box of new agey spirituality they’re frequently placed in and are, more often than not, about experiences of nature itself and, sure, the spiritual dimensions of nature are included in that, but they rarely use these experiences as mere metaphors for the Path To Enlightenment.

I think “Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness” is not only more unread, but perhaps a bit more interesting as a series of questions about how we cope with darkness, cold and winter in general. And winter itself for me (and probably most other people with medical problems exacerbated by cold weather) is something to be coped with, not a metaphor for other kinds of hardship. I love the vivid, spooky images of cold weather Oliver uses, the world’s descent into “the rich mash” (4), the “crisping day[s]” (19) and the “cold and black” ponds (21). But I also love the language of familiarity which gives a sense of nature being a friend or partner more than a lover, especially in the two lines “the vivacity of what was is married / to the vitality of what will be” (11-12).