What beauty is for

  Just finished reading this collected volume of Mary Oliver’s poetry. I’ll leave the details on the sidebar for a wee while in case you want to go looking for yourself.

The detailed and affectionate observation of God’s creation is a bit like Annie Dillard’s prose, shaped to verse – but she is gentler than Dillard, her tone more like the appreciative and endlessly wondering David Attenborough. But her guided tour in the natural world often brings her to a different kind of reverie, about key questions we all ask, or are asked, in our more receptive moments. I found this volume reassuring bedside reading – not because her poems didn’t ask searching questions, but because when they did, it came as an invitation to enter the experience of her own questioning, and that deeper conversation .

The Swan is one of my favourites.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?