Mary Oliver

Improved Essays
Imagine living in a world that was so fast paced there wasn’t any time to ever slow down and observe the surroundings. In today’s society, this imaginative setting is starting to turn into a reality. People are so caught up in the idea of being the most important life forms, they are failing to understand the concept of what really matters in life; they are forgetting to live in a biocentric universe. Humans need to learn to love this world along with living in the moment and sharing a symbiotic relationship with nature. Mary Oliver uses her poetry to demonstrate the importance of a biocentric universe by showing the reader how simplistic the natural world is.

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

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    For billions of years, nature has dictated the survival and appearance of a species. However in Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods suggests that know we– human beings– are the ones changing the face of nature. Louv introduces the article with a study about controlling the color of butterfly wings then moving on to show the comparison between parks and advertising. Then, Louv transitions into a hypothetical example of a mother who did not want to buy backseat entertainment for her child and the mother then clarifies that she is doing this because of how her “understanding of how cities and nature fit together was gained from the backseat” (lines 49-50). Through the use of a scientific study, hypothetical example, series of rhetorical questions, and repetition Louv sheds light on the increasing separation between people and nature to his reader– anyone who has either fallen or is falling out with nature.…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Since the beginning of time, all of mankind has depended on the land for basic survival-such as the “Bare Necessities.” However, man began to stray away from “al-naturale” by finding any way to control nature and use it to their advantage. Therefore, over time, the relationship between man and nature grew despondently, just as Richard Louv emphasizes in his excerpt, the “Last Child in the Woods.” Louv stresses that the loss of nature will hit home in present and future generations by using an anecdote, rhetorical logos, and a sense of nostalgia through pathos.…

    • 772 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    1.) Thoreau’s journals, within “American Earth” by Al Gore, consolidates numerous themes and materials revolving around environmental writings. Sequentially he starts out contemplating that even after one dies they will live on through nature. He then continues to elaborate on the beauty of nature and how humans take it for granted. This is evident when he’s describing men that have grown ignorant to sounds of nature, “silence audible,” as he calls it.…

    • 450 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I like this poem because of the existential themes that Edward Hirsch tackles, such as: mortality, divinity, temporality, and individuality. I can see all the images that the author describes, and feel that I am a part of the poem, too. Even though it is a short poem, it can transmit so many emotions. I think that this poem is about an old man in a wheelchair (“Wheel me down to the shore”), who feels that he is about to die.…

    • 343 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mary Oliver’s poem “The Black Walnut Tree” portrays a beatiful comparison between a Black Walnut tree and our lives struggles. She cleverly uses metaphor to show how life’s struggles are just like that of a tree, as well as using logos and ethos to persuade the audience that the tree is indeed like family. Subliminal metaphor is one figurative language tool that is used in this poem.…

    • 428 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    So I finally settled on the poem “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. The overall theme of the poem has the meaning of nature and finding one’s self. I found this poem to be enticing because the whole idea of figuring out who you are is the epitome of life and a crucial part of everyone’s lives. Oliver begins the poem with three rhetorical questions. These questions increase in specific detail order.…

    • 708 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Jane Hirshfield is connected to nature at her home in Marin County, California this is where she gets her inspiration for her poems. Hirshfield published “Tree” in 2000 as a free verse poem, breaking it into 4 stanzas and 4 sentences to convey the nature world. The poem represents a “young redwood” (line 2) that is growing near a house, near a kitchen window. The redwood is already scraping against the window frame of the house, reminding the reader of the “foolish” (line 1) idea of letting it grow there. Humans were created to be one with nature, but as they evolved as a species, they were obligated to choose between the materialistic world or the world of nature.…

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mary Oliver reveals conjectures people make about other people and other cultures in her poem, “Singapore.” Oliver shares a woman’s experience in an airport bathroom. The speaker in the poem is inwardly conflicted, and her internal thoughts displayed throughout the poem alter. At first, the poem reveals the speaker’s thoughts towards a woman working as a custodian at the airport as degrading and poignant. The speaker judgmentally feels sorry for the woman and takes pity on her.…

    • 903 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    In “Under The Snow” John Mcphee expresses the connection he has created with the bear cubs in his care. He even compared them to his own kids “When my third daughter was an infant, I could place her against my shoulder and she would stick there like velvet... The first cub I placed on my shoulder stayed there like a piece of velvet”( ). Mcphee continued to describe what his job working with the cubs entails. Taking care of abandoned cubs in teams to help them through the winter and then placing them with mothers that are willing to take care of them. I have always harbored a love and curiosity about animals.…

    • 350 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Nature is not kind; it is not good. Nature is the force that propels bees to fly themselves to the death just for the chance to mate with their queen. Nature is the floods that swallow up towns and cities and destroy the lives of hundreds. These dark truths are concealed by society’s obsession with the beauty and meaning of nature. In today’s society, we no longer reflect Emerson’s fanciful view of nature but Oates’s cynical perspective.…

    • 556 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    “I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly,”( line1), introducing the earth as a female in the beginning of the poem“Sleeping In The Forest” was a bold move made by Mary Oliver. The poet uses metonymy, personification, and symbolism to move the direction of the audiences thought of a forest into a whole new idea of peace and softness. Her main idea is to show how men view women in their full integrity through the correspondence of a dark forest and a woman. The speaker is portrayed as a male figure and uses multiple literary devices to reach the point of clarity that women are assumed to be scary and mysterious but overall very gentle and comforting. With the use of metonymy throughout the poem, Oliver gives multiple metaphors of the speaker, comparing the forest to women.…

    • 1616 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The third and fourth lines of this poem are also metaphors. In nature everything eventually dies and is quite remembered when it is young and beautiful, but as time goes by the leaves die and become brittle and then new leaves are reborn. The entirety of this poem is about life and death cycle of humans. In this poem he uses a lot of metaphors just like “The Road not Taken”, however, he also uses quite a bit of alliteration in this one. The person speaking…

    • 1378 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    As children, nature greatly intrigues us and gives us numerous experiences that life at home cannot. Experiencing nature allows children to deepen their connection with the environment that surrounds them and the secret wonders they might discover. In Sara Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron”, Sylvia, a child who spends much time in the story-like realm of the woods near her home, meets a charming hunter who is looking for the rare white heron. The hunt for the heron allows Sylvia to explore the woods deeply and climb the great pine tree of the forest. Before encountering the hunter, the woods near Sylvia’s home provided her an escape to a parallel universe where she could enjoy and observe nature’s many wonders.…

    • 1416 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Comparison Between The Three Poems In the poems “The Passionate Shepherd” by Christopher Marlowe, “The Nymph 's reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh, and “Raleigh Was Right” by William Carlos Williams, all share a central idea in unit one. They all view nature, either bad or good. The Shepherd and the Nymph both share images that tend to have the same thinking. In all the three poems, the authors depict how society views nature.…

    • 883 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    S. Eliot is a modernist poet with numerous works to his credit and the masterpiece is The Waste Land crowning him as the greatest poet in the twentieth century. Eliot fulfilled his self-imposed duties by using the materials of the city life to build up his poetry. The ecological theme of Eliot’s The Waste Land is very rarely discovered which tries to probe this espousing theme of literary criticism. Eliot has splattered an ecological inequilibrium and a world which has not regenerated in The Waste Land. He employs his diverse talent and poetic gifts and creations to show his great ecological concerns towards the depressing, estranged and depreciating…

    • 2000 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays

Related Topics