The Earth as God's Body: Incarnation as Communion in the Poetry of Mary Oliver:

"I am sensual in order to be spiritual."--Oliver, "Winter Hours" In the poems Mary Oliver writes and the manner in which she has chosen to live her life, it is clear that the poet's vocation consists of attending to the world, which for her is a sacred home. With the vitality and second sight of a mystic, Oliver proclaims that inside the "bright fields" of poppies "is an invitation / to happiness, / and that happiness / / when it's done right, / is a kind of holiness, / palpable and redemptive" ("Poppies" Blue Iris 45). For nearly fifty years, in her art Oliver has celebrated this kind of "happiness"--which she locates in the daily workings of the earth--and with gratitude and reverence she has been redeemed by her love for the earth again and again, declaring that "every day / I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth / of the ideas of God" ("So Every Day," Red Bird 70). Oliver's ability to sustain a voice of joy, of true ecstatic fervor, is remarkable and rare in a postmodern age that celebrates irony and cynicism, and like so many of the poets she calls upon and is descended from--Whitman and Blake and Emerson and Hopkins and Shelley and Keats, all unabashed lovers of the spirit--she sees her writing as a quest toward different ways of knowing, seeking, as she says in "Bone," "to figure out / what the soul is, / and where hidden, / and what shape" (Why I Wake Early 4). Yet in the course of a poetic lifetime that includes winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Oliver continues to live an astonishingly humble existence, characterizing herself as a woman of "no special courage" Oliver describes her ritualized writing schedule as "Everyday--a little conversation with God, or his envoy / the tall pine, or the grass-swimming cricket" (The Leaf and the Cloud 9). Her daily practice of rising early and entering the woods or walking the beaches that surround Provincetown at the far edge of Cape Cod's turning spit may seem unremarkable to the poet, but for her audience--which is itself quite unusual for its size and devotion in an era of diminishing poetry sales and readers--such journeys into the elemental beginning of day are holy work, a kind of communion they yearn to read about in their poet's missives sent back from her time spent studying God's envoy. In Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature, John Elder claims that "Poetry, like faith, depends upon the substance of things hoped for and illuminates the evidence of things not seen" (217). At every turn, Oliver uses poetry to explore her own faith and her own faith to create a poetry that can only be described as a fusion of Transcendental, Buddhist, and Christian thought grounded firmly in the earth, which Oliver repeatedly avows is "God's body." Through her art the poet reaches outward in language, as well as in body, to embrace a particular flower or tree, a dog or deer, or the very ocean itself, which slips through her hands like the Holy Ghost. As she explains in "On Thy Wondrous Works I will Meditate" it is not hard to understand where God's body is, it is everywhere and everything; shore and the vast fields of water, the accidental and the intended over here, over there. And I bow down participate and attentive. (Thirst 57) What draws her participation and attention is the firm conviction, shared with her beloved Emerson, that we are all "part or particle of God" and like Saint Francis of Assisi, she chooses not to elevate humans as the sole possessor of the soul. In the essay "Staying Alive" Oliver interrupts herself to boldly say, in italics, "I believe everything has a soul" (Blue Pastures 63), and this belief--perhaps Oliver's sole dogma or doctrine (1)--continually carries her out the door and into the sacrament of the world's wild beauty. Dogma or doctrine sounds so stern, so rigid, however, and to be fair to Oliver, her conviction appears to be far less about some hard-earned catechism, learned and recited dutifully, and far more about joyful play, about the spontaneous music of discovery she hears as she strides through a field or sits beneath the boughs of a hemlock. …