In “Spring,” Mary Oliver suggests to love the world like a bear does. The idea of a black bear is brought up numerous times throughout her poems, but this poem suggests a deeper meaning of a bear. The poem starts by possibly describing how a …show more content…
This poem displays Oliver’s advocacy for environmental ethics by showing how humans tend to do more harm than good. The narrator of this poem’s dream is to “learn something by being nothing” (190), a dream that fits in with biocentrism, being a piece of nature and having the ability to observe it’s peacefulness an beauty without disturbing it. The speaker of this poem concludes that they are disturbing the peace and must leave in order to bring peace back to the the kingdom. The final phrase, “no eater of leaves” (190), suggests that the speaker is “not an animal that eats the leaves, nor lives in the forest, nor a part of the ecosystem, therefore they are not a piece of the kingdom that they had dreamed of being in” (Fure 2016). Oliver’s main takeaway point here is that humans are dangerous and no long belong in nature because they are too disruptive, this shows that in modern society humans do not have biocentric views of this