Looking into Poems

Poetry Column for Chips, Luther College Student Newspaper

Luther College, Decorah, Iowa

By Carol Gilbertson, Dennis M. Jones Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities, 2002-04

---

December 5, 2002: "Transition from Fall to Winter Leads to Questions"

Mary Oliver, "First Snow," from New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.

Sample Section:

As I write this column, a light snow sifts down to outline wet branches and limestone walls outside my window. It's hard to tell, isn't it, exactly when autumn segues into winter? Yesterday I marveled that the oak's brown leaves still held tight to their branches; today each leaf, like an outstretched hand, holds a little white mound of snow. In a few hours, I suppose, the snow will be gone again, leaving the browns and grays of late fall. But the snow will return, and we know we will have real winter. In the poem called "First Snow," the poet Mary Oliver captures such a scene:

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning;

With the word "rhetoric" Oliver transforms a natural scene into a meditation. The snow is persuading us with its language, leading us to respond with questions. The natural beauty takes us outside of ourselves and our everyday preoccupations, and causes us to ponder philosophical questions of its causation, its origins, and its ultimate meaning. What does this snow's beautiful language mean? Why and how does it come to us? The poem goes on:

such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.

In this section, it's the words "oracular fever" that strike us. An oracle is a prophecy, so the phrase "oracular fever" pictures the snow's fervent falling as an energy that speaks solemn wisdom--a continuation of the first section's "rhetoric" metaphor.

The poem leads us into the scene created when the snow stops falling, capturing the quiet magic of a moonlit night full of stars over the new-fallen snow:

The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;

The snow transforms the world into seemingly infinite quiet, and familiar, mundane things miraculously become something new and stunning under the "candles" of the stars. Darkness is not fearful here, and trees, fields, and creekbeds shimmer with significant beauty. What is the meaning of such beauty, and where does it come from? And who are we to be its lucky recipients?

In the poem's final section, the poet returns to these questions, and the scene itself becomes a kind of epiphany:

and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain--not a single
answer has been found--
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

The snowy scene--the light and silence--becomes itself an answer, or at least elicits a satisfaction with what is without the need for answers to how it came to be so. The word "heavens" in the earlier section lightly suggests something spiritual, but the poem works with a very delicate touch. There is no clear spiritual claim here. Instead-and without responding to our questioning--the scene gently asserts a kind of spiritual peace.

---

BACK TO LOOKING INTO POEMS

BACK TO HOME