Another cutesy attitude mars Oliver's "White Eye" which personifies, or rather birdifies, the wind as a big bird that wants to make its nest in the trees and go to sleep, tucking its "head" under its "wing." One might be inspired by the nice wind, perhaps, if one could forget hurricanes and tornadoes. "to know our world /is to be busy/ all day long/ with happiness" she sings in "The Dovekie." And that's the trouble with Mary.
Oliver never quarrels with God, or questions the system of nature that requires that life feed on life. Her faith is perfect. Where Bishop grieves "the hour badly spent" Oliver invites us to "Watch, now, how I start the day/ in happiness, in kindness." After a dozen or so of these starry-eyed rhapsodies, Oliver's creator-affirming acceptance gets cloying, like the drinking of too many ice-cream sodas, and the suspicion arises that she has a rather bad case of denial. Where Bishop's vision admits and even seeks out abhorrent realities, a bald pink dog with the mange, for example, Oliver puts on rose-colored glasses.
Oliver never quarrels with God, or questions the system of nature that requires that life feed on life. Her faith is perfect. Where Bishop grieves "the hour badly spent" Oliver invites us to "Watch, now, how I start the day/ in happiness, in kindness." After a dozen or so of these starry-eyed rhapsodies, Oliver's creator-affirming acceptance gets cloying, like the drinking of too many ice-cream sodas, and the suspicion arises that she has a rather bad case of denial. Where Bishop's vision admits and even seeks out abhorrent realities, a bald pink dog with the mange, for example, Oliver puts on rose-colored glasses.
One needn't be a poet like Ted Hughes, taking delight in the more disgusting aspects of nature, or as urbane as Bishop or Marianne Moore to write out of a modern consciousness. The pastoral poem will always have an important psychic function as an imaginative respite in nature, maybe moreso now, when only an understanding of our place in the whole can correct our dangerous human-centered view. But Edmund Spenser's Shepeard's Calendar will not work for us as it did for educated Brits in 1579, because nowadays we take planes, trains and automobiles and worry about it. Take off your bonnet, Mary, it's too late to live in the Sixteenth Century.
We need tougher, maybe uglier, pastorals than Oliver's poems. Only poetry that asserts the presence of goodness while acknowledging evil can bring comfort in a world where children sent to school may be taken hostage or shot. Little Mary Sunshine doesn't get it done.
We need tougher, maybe uglier, pastorals than Oliver's poems. Only poetry that asserts the presence of goodness while acknowledging evil can bring comfort in a world where children sent to school may be taken hostage or shot. Little Mary Sunshine doesn't get it done.
