Emily Dickinson noted that “We play at paste — | Till qualified, for Pearl —” so bear with me, friends.
Today we look at “On Winter’s Margin,” an early poem by Mary Oliver dating from the mid-1960s (her first volume having appeared in 1963).
You’re thinking of the Mary Oliver who more or less abjured meter, the capitalization at the head of each line, and what I’ll call legacy forms in her slim volume about writing poetry; the Mary Oliver who could write a stanza like
Finally,
the slick mountains of love break
over us.
The point I want to make is simply that “On Winter’s Margin” looks for all the world like an amalgam of a Spenserian and Petrarchan sonnet, albeit with 5- and 7 lines in the first two stanzas, respectively, which doesn’t quite fit either mold. Laying it out as she does with that concluding couplet constitutes an unmistakable nod to the sonnet tradition, at least. Something like iambic pentameter rules, and the ear responds with pleasure to combinations such as win/gin (l. 1), forged/flocking (l. 2), gar/char (l. 3), and so on.
One notices that stanza 1, with its imperative (“See”) is descriptive and objective; stanza 2 zooms in on the poet (or the poet’s puppet) with its threefold repetition of “I” — again reminding me of Shakespeare’s method of moving from the impersonal to the personal. The couplet, as we’d expect, brings it home with a breathtaking swoop — “They are what saves the world” — although ending with “squalor” suggests a more complicated view for which the poem has not necessarily prepared us.
Yes, I admire it.
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The earthworm sings to the soil,
The tulip invokes the worm,
The fawn conjures the tulip
And together they soothe the moon to bed.
Daybreak urges the worm to hurry,
Urges the fawn to refrain from forage,
Persuades the tulip to inflate her balloon.
The soil’s refrain informs their spells
As she welcomes rain,
Softens the tulip, waters the fawn,
And awaits the worm.
- fawn
- highway
- gardenia
- earthworm
- relent
- independence
- soil
- refrain
- reply
- repay
- reverse
- reform
I buried the list for a few days with the intention of using it as raw material for a second exercise where I’d string the words together, but upon exhuming it I recoiled from my predilection for becoming more abstract rather than more particular as I went along, as though my brain were on crutches. I had begun my list with a narrative of some sort (fawn killed on highway, becomes food for gardenias), then found myself on a dead-end siding, maybe because I was groping for an re- word that never came. (“Restaurant” might have offered interesting possibilities, as in “The fawn is the earthworm’s restaurant.”)
Using the full list was out of the question, but, like a toddler talking to his shoes, the words called “Work with me here!” I tried. “Refrain” appealed since the noun and verb summon each other; I keep thinking that reform, reply, reverse are not impossible and will have to meditate on that. Meanwhile, deer don’t like gardenias, but if my garden is any measure, they are fond of tulips. Since lists always want to appear in threes, this iconoclast shelved five items in a row at the end: oh the luxury of it, the burgeoning of nature, the going over the top! Yet dark implications, not so far removed from my original leaning toward that poor fawn on the highway, prevail:
After Rain
The earthworm’s song to the soil,
The tulip’s to the worm,
The fawn’s to the tulip
Break the morning news.
Daybreak urges the worm to hurry,
The fawn to refrain from what forage she found,
The complacent tulip to a shyer grace.
The soil’s refrain informs their singing
Because she merely coddles the rain,
The tulip, the fawn, the worm, the morning
And waits.
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