Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

To Each Her HoneybyLara WulsinMary Oliver’s poetry tends to focus on a being or a scene in natureinto which she breathes human sentiments. Three of her poems, “Happiness,”“The Turtle,” and “Milkweed,” portray both women in nature andthe nature of women, their suffering, and their overcoming. The three differentimages depicted in these poems each seem to capture some aspect oflife of a feminine being in nature that seems hard or painful to the onlooker.And yet in each case there is a redeeming attitude, shared by the subjectsof all three poems, that the challenging parts of life are no less important orexpected than the pleasurable parts.“Happiness” is a blithe description of a she-bear’s affair with anenclave of honey. The first five lines depict the bear’s hunt for the honey, hertreasure. These first lines, all trimeter, do not yet yield a clear mental pictureof this bear. They do, however, give a feel for the treasure. The many long“e” sounds in lines 3, 4, and 5 all appear in key words, such as “sweetness,”“honey,” “bees,” “trees.” These words and sounds evoke what the she-bearis searching for. Line 6 breaks the trimeter, and for the first time appears animage of this “black block of gloom,” the bear. These words linger on thetongue, enhancing her slow, dark, large figure. “Shuffled” in line 7 addsmovement to the “black block of gloom,” while “tree after tree” emphasizesthe determination of the bear to attain her goal.Finally, in the following line, she finds her “honey-house deep asheartwood.” The alliteration of the “h”s in this delicious phrase only makethe honey more golden, deeper, sweeter. In lines 11 and 12, the trimeter isagain broken by the she-bear fearlessly plunging in among the “swarmingbees,” while she “lipped and tongued and scooped out in her black nails”247