I realize that many of you regard my instincts as a writer hopelessly out of date. I admire poets who were working 50, 75, 100 years ago —and I haven’t even mentioned Browning’s and Tennyson’s dramatic monologues, than which one could do worse, I think.
Emily Dickinson noted that “We play at paste — | Till qualified, for Pearl —” so bear with me, friends.
Today we look at “On Winter’s Margin,” an early poem by Mary Oliver dating from the mid-1960s (her first volume having appeared in 1963).
You’re thinking of the Mary Oliver who more or less abjured meter, the capitalization at the head of each line, and what I’ll call legacy forms in her slim volume about writing poetry; the Mary Oliver who could write a stanza like
Finally,
the slick mountains of love break
over us.
The point I want to make is simply that “On Winter’s Margin” looks for all the world like an amalgam of a Spenserian and Petrarchan sonnet, albeit with 5- and 7 lines in the first two stanzas, respectively, which doesn’t quite fit either mold. Laying it out as she does with that concluding couplet constitutes an unmistakable nod to the sonnet tradition, at least. Something like iambic pentameter rules, and the ear responds with pleasure to combinations such as win/gin (l. 1), forged/flocking (l. 2), gar/char (l. 3), and so on.
One notices that stanza 1, with its imperative (“See”) is descriptive and objective; stanza 2 zooms in on the poet (or the poet’s puppet) with its threefold repetition of “I” — again reminding me of Shakespeare’s method of moving from the impersonal to the personal. The couplet, as we’d expect, brings it home with a breathtaking swoop — “They are what saves the world” — although ending with “squalor” suggests a more complicated view for which the poem has not necessarily prepared us.
Yes, I admire it.