Mary Oliver, "Whistling Swans"

On poetry ... and praying with swans

It’s time for a poem.

It’s always time for a poem.

Poems are probably my most consistent companions. While I don’t have many poems memorized (a misfortune I always intend to rectify but never do), I have a sense that those I’ve read never entirely leave me. They’ve shaped the way I see and move in the world.

Poems pack a punch, saying in short form what other genres take pages, or even entire books, to say. Their containment is what makes them mighty; it also makes them transportable.

I’ve been known to take poems to birthday dinners, revealing handouts for partygoers just as cake is served. (My friends seem not to dislike this practice, but I can imagine it’s a bit startling.) I bring “pocket poems” to my students, six or eight of the same printed in small font on a single sheet that I cut up and distribute at the end of class. “Read it later today. See what you find. There might be a gift in it.”

It's a rare poem indeed that doesn’t offer us something. And the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019) is no exception.

My colleague (a poet herself) calls Mary Oliver “a poet for people who don’t like poetry.” Oliver’s poetry emerges from her own practice of slowing down and noticing. While I don’t really know how she typically spent her days, I like to imagine that she wandered the woods, sat by the creek, and gazed at the sky, gathering up insights from daffodils and foxes and pine trees and bees.

And (why not?) swans.

Photo by Hansjörg Rath on Unsplash

Whistling Swans

Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look
up into that blue space?
Take your choice, prayers fly from all directions.
And don’t worry about what language you use,
God no doubt understands them all.
Even when the swans are flying north and making
such a ruckus of noise, God is surely listening
and understanding.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul.
But isn’t the return of spring and how it
springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Yes, I know, God’s silence never breaks, but is
that really a problem?
There are thousands of voices, after all.
And furthermore, don’t you imagine (I just suggest it)
that the swans know about as much as we do about
the whole business?
So listen to them and watch them, singing as they fly.
Take from it what you can.

I’ve never heard a preacher suggest that swans might help us pray. But poets may know something peculiar about prayer.

Prayer is a mysterious thing, as all religions and all people of faith freely attest. However prayer is understood or experienced, most would agree (I think) that it hinges on the relationship between the human and divine, the eternal and temporal, the material and transcendent. In prayer, the two commune and converse. Oliver is here pondering that relationship and using questions (four of them) to help her reimagine what constitutes prayer.

On the human/earthly side of things, prayer is diverse. It consists of all manner of words and postures, arising “from all directions,” in all sorts of languages, from all kinds of creatures. Through the verb “fly,” the poem generates a creaturely community of pray-ers: our own prayers “fly” just like the swans “are flying.” This conflation of prayers and swans means, in the world of the poem, that everything about the swans also applies to prayer.

The swans begin and end the poem in motion. They (like are our own prayers) are always active, always generating, never ceasing. The swans also begin and end the poem as purveyors of sound. They are, after all, “whistling.” At the beginning, they make “such a ruckus of noise,” which gives way, in the final line, to “singing as they fly.” If prayers are like swans, the poem frees us to pray both in ruckus and in song. And also, apparently, in whistle. No matter which—God hears and understands it all.

For God’s part in prayer, the poem is clear: “God is surely listening and understanding” even as “God’s silence never breaks.” This is a divine paradox, a God both silent and attentive, unperceived but understanding, active and invisible. But while the poem is quick to name God’s silence, it’s just as quick to name a divine choir. Even if God is silent, “There are thousands of voices, after all,” through which we might hear the divine.

The swans, too, seem to be one of the ways God speaks.

The swans then are metaphors for both sides of the prayer conversation. They are creatures, like ourselves, that God sees and hears. And they are also conduits of the divine, a voice speaking back to us.

And so, the poet says, we must listen, watch, sing, and make a ruckus.

“Take from it what you can.”