Poetry Close Analysis

Mary Oliver's Happiness

For my class discussion poem, I chose Happiness, from Mary Oliver's American Primative. To me, a person who does not have to find hidden "powerful" meaning in each poem, I thought it was just about a bear on her quest to obtain honey, or her quest for happiness. but through classroom discussion, I learned that others felt it was both a spiritual quest for religion, as well as a sexual encounter between two women.

I saw Happiness as just a "she-bear"'s quest for honey; the poem details 'I' whom I assumed to be Mary Oliver, watching a bear in the afternoon. At first the poem seems to have negative meanings, as Oliver details the "Black block of gloom" whilst the bear searches in many trees for honey. Once she obtains her honey, she consumes it's sweetness until "maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe a little drunk." After the bear is full and 'happy', she is described as an enormous bee, "all sweetness and wings" and Oliver describes roses and flowers in a happy tone.

The first point brought up in discussion that suprised me was the poem's sexual connotations. Most of Mary Oliver's poems seem to have sexual innuendos wrapped in them somewhere, I learned after our discussions. After some discussion, Anders brought up the point that this poem's diction seems to describe the sexual portions in a female form. "She lipped and toungued and scooped out in her black nails," is one of the main sexual phrases. Describing the honeycombs as "the tree's soft caves," in freudian theology, implies that the trees are female. The interactions between the she-bear and the female trees, the poem seems to take not only a sexual side, but a lesbian side as well.

Lyndsey Guthrey brought up an idea in discussion that did not provoke much discussion, but I found it very thought-provoking. To her the poem described a spiritual quest to find religion, and the happiness truly finding it brings. This meant a lot to me, as I aslo felt the poem was about a quest. So I re-read the poem, realating it to religion. The beginning of the poem starts with the "bear", or person, in a "black block of gloom," until she found it in the deep in the woods. Upon it's discovery, she "dipped into it among the swarming bees," immersing herself in the religion she has chosen. When she is 'full'y submerged in the religion, she acts as a bee, which I saw as an angel, and "let go of the branches...all sweetness and wings." The she-bear does the leap-of-faith and falling from the tree, ascends into heaven.

I originally enjoyed this poem because I thought it was simple, but through discussion I learned that it was just as deep, if not more so, as most of Mary Oliver's poems in American Primative. Poetry is a form of literature that can read many ways, and for different readers those ways can be entirely different.