Critical Analysis of In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
Critical Analysis of "In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver
The poem, “ In Blackwater Woods”, by Mary Oliver describes the beauty of a forest destroyed by fires. She talks about the features of the land, how they were destroyed, and the emotional loss that she still carries since it burned.
In her first stanza, “ Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light”, describes how the fire had climbed up the trees and made them look like burning pillars. Oliver uses the verb look to grab the reader’s attention right away and emphasize how important the event is to her. She also uses personification here when she refers to the tree’s trunks as bodies. Oliver incorporates some alliteration with trees and turning; the repetitious [ t ], alveolar stops, adds to the flow of the stanza.
The second stanza describes the smell of the tress burning; she uses the adjective rich and the noun cinnamon to refer to the potpourri-like scents. The alliteration she uses here is fragrance and fulfillment. This is effective because it contributes to the intensity of the smell description. Her clear imagery extends into stanza three, which reads, “ the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds.” Oliver paints the picture of cattails going up in flames and being swept away by the rivers. Again she uses the repetition of consonant sounds in bursting and blue, which are both bilabial stops.
Stanza four Oliver writes, “ and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now.” She tells about how the forest has lost its identity and that there are no more unique spots. Oliver’s syntactic structure here adds a lot to the poem’s meaning. She uses ponds and then ponds, and name and then nameless. This repetition of words is essential to the rhythm and smoothness of the piece. In stanza five she explains, “ every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this”. This time she repeats vowel sounds three times in every year, everything, and ever. This assonance keeps her poem orderly and clearly accentuates the meaning she is trying to expose. She talks about everything she has ever learned leads back to, “the fires and the black...