Blue Horses

By Mary Oliver

Publication Year: 2014

Type: Poetry

Genre: nature

Read on 2022-11-17

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☆☆☆☆☆

I never know how to rate books of poetry so I don’t. It also just seems kind of wrong to rate poetry out of 5 stars.

Themes/motifs of nature, animism, trees, birds, rocks, water. Also (I think) agnosticism? A few surprise sweet little love poems tucked in between. Some favourite fragments:

“Idleness can be a form of dying, I did know that.”

“The sea is the sea is/ always the sea.”

“I know you never intended to be in this world.
But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately,

I mean belonging to it.
[…]
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be as urgent as a knife then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.”