Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

– Mary Oliver

Notes

Here are a few of my favorite lines from Mary Oliver’s “Swan,” with analysis.

A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,

In this line, Mary Oliver uses a trick that I teach in my Mystical Poetry Course. The trick is using paradoxical language to invite the reader to an experience beyond words.

Using paradox, we guide the reader’s consciousness through a miniature experience of cosmic consciousness. We invite them to hold the tension of two apparent opposites at the same time. In doing so, they get a glimpse of the third thing that happens when the opposites resolve into one another. Of that which cannot be captured in words.

In short, the mystical poet takes the reader, through paradox, to the end of where words can go. All they have to do is take the final step into the space beyond words.

From Soul Poets Workshop: Mystical POetry Course

A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?

Here, again, Mary Oliver uses a sort of paradox. As she makes clear in the last line, she is describing something beautiful. Yet the words she chooses in these two lines are harsh (not unlike the “harsh and exciting” call of the wild geese in her poem of the same name).

In taking in her language, we come face to face with the stark beauty of nature. This is not just the beauty of a blossoming flower, but also of the flower’s dried stem topped with a tiny puff of snow. It is not just the beauty of the small creatures who pad silently on tiny feet through the forest, but also of the owls that hunt them.

We are not drawn into a false image of nature as only benevolent and pretty. Rather, we are beckoned into an experience of awe at the beauty that transcends both the pretty or the profane.

And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?

Mary Oliver ambles freely between the natural and the mystical. As William Blake suggests, she sees “a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”

And when we read her poems with a silent mind and an open heart, we see it, too.

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

What, we wonder, is beauty “for”? Of course, there is no answer in words. And so Mary Oliver simply asks us another question. “And have you changed your life?”

When we truly allow beauty to pierce us, it transfigures us in ways we did not imagine possible. We realize what it is for, though we can’t put it into words. It is not so much a purpose, like that of a tool, which is used for some other end. It is more like a doorway.

Over an over again, Mary Oliver invites us to step through that door.