A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Black Snake"
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A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Black Snake" - Gale
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The Black Snake
Mary Oliver
1979
Introduction
Although Mary Oliver has earned a reputation as a nature poet, her work extends beyond simple descriptions of natural beauty to venture into larger philosophical questions about life. In The Black Snake,
Oliver contemplates the connectedness of all creatures, the inevitability of death, and the optimism of life for itself. This poem first appeared in Oliver's 1979 collection Twelve Moons, a volume that firmly established her poetic voice. According to Anthony Manousos, writing in American Poets since World War II, in Twelve Moons Oliver explores natural cycles and processes, equating them with what is deepest and most enduring in human experience.
As in many of her other volumes, the poems of Twelve Moons often feature an individual animal who moves Oliver to a meditation on some aspect of human life.
Oliver clearly continued to value The Black Snake
in the years following its initial publication, as she included the poem, along with several others from Twelve Moons, in her 1992 book New and Selected Poems. The poem has been widely anthologized and is well known among those familiar with Oliver's work. For readers approaching Oliver for the first time, The Black Snake
offers an excellent introduction to this important poet's views on life, death, and the connectedness of all living things.
Author Biography
Mary Jane Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, on September 10, 1935. Her father was Edward William Oliver, and her mother was Helen M. Vlasak Oliver. Raised in Ohio, Oliver spent considerable time as a young woman at the home of the recently deceased poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, working as a personal assistant to Millay's sister. She first met the woman who would become her life partner