‘Past Those Green Temples’: The Eco-Humanist Poetics of Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, and Anne Carson

Abstract

The preface for Mary Oliver’s poem ‘The River’, featured in her collection Dream Work (1986), cites an article by the New York Times: ‘In one day the Amazon discharges into the Atlantic the equivalent of New York City’s water supply for nine years.’(Dream Work 20). In the verses that follow this statistic, the poet (1935-2019) proposes a perspective that is at once human and river – merging the bodies of humanity and water in one. The poem’s speaker recalls her origins, wilfully ignoring the bureaucratic factoids of birthdate and place and defines themselves as ‘a grain / carried by the flood’ of a great, universal and unnamed river. This unnamed river, presumably the Amazon of the poem’s statistical prelude, carries the blueprint of the speaker’s history. It is also the place called ‘home’ by the speaker, a place remembered and yearned for. Throughout, the poem recalls a sense of wanting to belong and return to an unidentified and yet uniquely familiar river, or larger body of water. In a state of reverie, the speaker muses on how ‘the smell of mud and leaves returned to me / and in dreams I began to turn, / to sense the current’(20). The sensual borders of being human and being water merge completely here. Finally, after nostalgic remembrance, the speaker finds that it is ‘past those green temples’ where the final resting place is, where the body moves towards subconsciously, where home truly is.