World Class Poetry Blog

Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem” Shows Us Our Own Sweet Devouring
9 January 2008, the poet @ 12:27 am

I just spent about six hours revising. Four of those were spent on one poem. I’d be interested to know how long you spend revising your poetry. Do you revise or go with the first draft? When you do revise, do you revise all at once or do you revise in bits, one line or stanza at a time?

I don’t get much time to revise any more, but since I am working toward the end of a two-year-long project, I feel compelled to finish. Impelled might be a better word. I am driven to finish what I started and to do that, revision is necessary.

Critical Analysis: Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem”
Yesterday I mentioned an online poetry discussion group started by Jillypoet. This was a good idea. This week the discussion is around Mary Oliver’s poem “Cold Poem.”

Some in the group have mentioned how the poem is a little aloof, or out of touch for them. I confess, it is a little bit for me as well. But I did manage to find a clue. Here is the poem in reprint, copied from Poemhunter:

Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.

I believe this poem hangs on the obscure wording of “suet.” To many Americans, this strange word is inaccessible. Get out your dictionary.

The beauty of “Cold Poem” is that each measured stanza is a window into its own small part of the whole, each containing a movement of its own. The opening lines seem claustrophobic, setting the scene and the pace for the rest of the poem. The alliterative hard C’s kick us in the shins as we get the feel of the biting cold. It is winter, seemingly an arctic one. “Almost unbearable.” Then the hard C’s transform into another alliterative movement within a movement, from “unbearable” to “bunch up,” “boil down,” and a repetition of “bear.” The clouds bunch up and boil down like humans shrinking from the cold and “bear” could also be an allusion to the naked truth within the poem, a nude, shrewd reminder of our humanness. And white is certainly a fitting color for our bear. It makes me see snow before I am confronted with it later in the poem.

Anyone who has lived in the north has had those “tree-splitting” mornings. Those are mornings that you know you are burning last winter’s trees. But on this particular morning the narrator dreams of this white bear, seeing his tracks in the snow (again, a foreshadowing of the later, more obvious reference). And the final epiphany of the first movement, the beginning stanza, is the “lifesaving suet,” with its internal alliteration and allusion to hunger.

Suet is the fat tissue around the kidney. This is our clue into the meaning of the poem, if Archibald can forgive us for seeking it. Now on to the second movement.

“Cold Poem,” Summer Fruit
We do not need the summer to tell us how cold it is, but the contrast between the seasons in Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem” gives us another clue as to where she is taking us: Its luminous fruit, “blossoms rounding into berries.” We are living in the wild. We must fend for ourselves, for our every meal. First, it is the bear in the hard, cold winter; then, the summer comes and we must learn to eat other kinds of life. How dare we?

Cold Again: Blue Sharks, Seals, And Self Love
We come back to the cold again in stanza three. The poem seems to pick up pace here as well. Oliver dispenses with the short sentences of earlier, in stanza two. But the summer movement is truncated in its own way, with only three lines and commas separating a list of appetizers. The main course is about to come.

“Maybe what cold is” leads us to a definition. Murky it seems, but it is a definition nonetheless. We are told it is the time we measure - not the act of measuring, but the time we measure - the love we secretly carry for ourselves. I love the way Mary Oliver puts those lines together, with “secretly” tucked neatly between its own protective commas. Another contrast: The cold against the “warm knife-edged love for the warm river of I.” Wow. Only Oliver can make the devout devouring of herself seem like a romantic getaway. This is definitely an imprint of her famous reclusive nature.

At this point, having been struck in the face with this earth shattering image of I as a warm river, a stanzaic emjambment continues the third movement into a shard of an image that defines everything else before it. “Maybe / that is what it (cold) means,” but I want to put a comma after “means” and it isn’t there. The internal enjambment, a run on, marks the beauty of devouring. The line seems to devour itself just as the blue sharks devour the tumbling seals. A remarkable climax!

How Cruel And Honest, Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem”
Finally, denouement. The beautiful lines

“In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest”

There is a contrast in every stanza of this poem. Many of the contrasts are between the stanzas - “unbearable” with “bear” in the first, “immeasurable” in the last with “measure” in the third, “luminous” in the second stanza with the bunched up clouds in the first, beauty with cruelty. Yet the contrasts seem to be describing the same event or Truth. They are as much comparisons as contrasts, which is what makes this such a dynamic poem.

In the cold, cruel, honest, immeasurable season of snow we “keep ourselves alive” by devouring - “taking one after another the necessary bodies of others - first, the bear, then the luminous fruit, ourselves in our solitude, like the blue shark attacking the seals and taking its meal. It is hard to tell just what Mary Oliver was thinking about when she ended the poem with “the many crushed red flowers.” It does seem, though, that it is another allusion to the devouring that the rest of the poem seems to be showing. It is likely a throw back to the “blossoms rounding to berries” in stanza two, but we can’t be sure. What we can be sure of is that those red flowers are crushed because something devoured them and used their life for its own. How true that is of ourselves as well.

2 Comments a “Mary Oliver’s “Cold Poem” Shows Us Our Own Sweet Devouring”

1. carolee — January 9, 2008 @ 3:27 pm
   

   hi! thanks for your insights @ poem. and thanks for even more discussion here. i love reading what you discovered in the piece!

2. the poet — January 10, 2008 @ 6:21 pm
   

   Thanks Carolee. My pleasure.

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