Mary Oliver is invariably described as a “nature poet” alongside such other exemplars of this form as Dickinson, Frost, and Emerson. Unlike those and other nature poets, however, her vision of the natural world is not steeped in realistic portrayal. If one to be completely honest about the way that Oliver addresses the world of nature throughout her extensive body of work, a more appropriate categorization for her would be utopian poet.
“The Swan” is a perfect choice for illuminating the way that Oliver writes about nature through an idealistic utopian perspective. This poem is structured as a series of questions. Questions directed to the reader are a standard device for Oliver who views poetry as a means of initiating discourse. The reader is rarely allowed the privilege of passivity when reading her verse. Through the means of posing questions, readers are coerced into becoming participants in an intellectual exercise. The questions posed here are the speaker asking the reader if they, too, witnessed the sight of the swan taking off from the black river into the bright sky. The final three lines of the poem are questions that move well beyond the subject and into the realm of philosophy about existence. By the last few lines, nature is no longer a subject either literally or figuratively. The swan has taken to flight and is long gone. All that is left are questions about what seeing the swan take to the sky from the water means. The reader is not allowed to simply reach the end and move on without pausing to give the circumstances describe deeper thought.
Like so many other creatures that populate the poetry of Oliver, the swan is not really the subject. The subject is not really nature. And the nature is not realistically addressed. The description of the swan uses metaphorical language throughout to create this disconnect from a realistic portrait. Nature is never realistically portrayed in Oliver’s poetry because in Oliver’s poetry nature is always perfect. It can do no wrong because such concepts deny the purity of acting naturally. She is not just an adherent of the Rousseau school which considers the “natural state” of things to be the most honest means of existence. Living in a “natural state” means living beyond the corruptibility of man’s attempts to impose authority over natural impulses. The swan, for instance, is living in its natural state by lazily floating down the river all night, but as soon as the morning light arrives it follows its nature by taking to the air. The floating is lazy, but the bird is not because the bird is just following instinct in not taking off into the mystery of the darkness.
The final query posed to the reader by the speaker in this poem is a greater plot twist than the revelation of Keyser Soze. This poem commences with the speaker asking the reader if they, too, witnessed the magnificence of a swan majestically rising into the air from the dark waters of a muddy river. The poem ends with the jaw-dropping transition to an interrogation: “And have you changed your life?” Few could possibly have predicted that the swan changing from a sitting duck in the water to a “white cross Streaming across the sky” would become the mechanism for a subtly veiled existential challenge for the reader to metaphorically make the same outrageous leap in the circumstances of their current situation. In Mary Oliver’s the inhabitants of the natural world around us can do no wrong and have much us to teach us about how to create a utopian ideal.
