The deeply spiritual, Pulitzer-winning poet Mary Oliver has died at age 83.
Mary Oliver, the Pulitzer-winning poet who yearned to be at one with everything she so deeply observed in nature, once penned a poem titled “When Death Comes” in which she wrote:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
(FROM NEW AND SELECTED POEMS)
Oliver has died at age 83.
In her beautiful memoir Long Life she wrote this about prayer:
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Men and women of faith who pray — that is, who come to a certain assigned place, at definite times, and are not ashamed to go down on their knees — will not tarry for the cup of coffee or the newsbreak or the end of the movie when the moment arrives. The habit, then, has become their life. What some might call the restrictions of the daily office they find to be an opportunity to foster the inner life. The hours are appointed and named; they are the Lord’s. Life’s fretfulness is transcended. The different and the novel are sweet, but regularity and repetition are also teachers. Divine attentiveness cannot be kept casually, or visited only in season, like Venice or Switzerland. Or, perhaps it can, but then how attentive is it? And if you have no ceremony, no habits, which may be opulent or may be simple but are exact and rigorous and familiar, how can you reach toward the actuality of faith, or even a moral life, except vaguely? The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.
Here are a couple of her most popular poems:
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