Worry or Not to Worry:

¶ … Worry or Not to Worry:

A Comparison of Poetry by Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver

Both writing about summer, Sharon Olds and Mary Oliver's poems "The Daughter Goes To Camp" and "Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject of Faith" share similarities and differences. The visual component of each poem is certainly different. Olds' work takes the form of a single column, which is not broken into stanzas. With lines of differing lengths, generally several longer lines broken by a few shorter lines, and punctuated with hyphens, this work gives the visual impression of what it is -- a series of feelings all balled up into one situation. In fact, the entirety of Olds' poem takes place in a taxi. The hyphens and short sentences seem to punctuate the space between the narrators' realization that her daughter is gone and her emotional reaction to this. Oliver's work, however, takes a strikingly different form. Organized into nine stanzas of four sentences, Oliver's work gives the impression of being much less compact than Olds' poem. Also using the technique of sentence length and hyphens as punctuation, Oliver seems to construct a poem that also represents, visually, what it is about. As her work considers the vegetation of summer, her short sentences and hyphens give the stanzas a twisting look; they snake up the page if they were some type of plant, some type of corn stalk or vine.

Like their visual representation, each poem's title is decidedly different. In Olds' poem, the title is necessary for what comes next. "The Daughter Goes To Camp" gives a summary of what is happening as the narrator writes. Without this title, the reader would be lost as to why exactly the narrator was feeling this emotion, or perhaps even the fact that the child she is referring to is her daughter. In Olds' poem title, one ordinary word seems to protrude as odd -- "the." Readers may consider the title several times in order to make sense of this word. To the reader, it does seem odd that the mother would refer to her daughter as "the daughter," instead of "my daughter," especially in light of the fact that she is so overcome with emotion after sending her off to camp. It is up to readers to reconcile the mother's emotion with the article that introduces her daughter. In Oliver's poem, on the other hand, "Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject Of Faith," gives not necessarily a summary of the poem's contents, but asks the reader to understand that the writer is trying to get at the subject of faith. Like Olds' poem, however, Oliver's poem title gives a crucial piece of information to the reader, letting him or her know that it is summer time, which allows the reader to make sense of the images of plant life, the sun, and the ocean. Thus, while the summer is the time period of both poems, their titles suggest that they are quite different.

This continues with a comparison of content of the two poems. Olds' poem gives the image of a mother sending her daughter off to camp for the first time, and displays the emotions that the mother feels. Parallels are drawn between the daughter's leaving and her birth; the mother seems to wonder how the daughter can be leaving her when she is so much a part of the mother, since the mother gave birth to her. The poem takes place as the mother returns from dropping her daughter off at the airport. She sits in "the taxi alone," overcome with her daughter's absence. In "Little Summer Poem Touching The Subject Of Faith," however, Oliver presents the reader with questions. Like Olds' poems touches on the question of how her daughter can be absent from her when she is the one who gave birth to her, Oliver's poem questions how the summer crops can continue to grow bigger and ripen when she does not hear anything or see anything of their growth -- she does not see their roots move nor hear them rustle. At the end of the poem, Olds' uses the fact that she cannot see or hear or witness in any way the growth of the crops to release her worry about the unknowable, saying that if the crops can continue to grow in the summer without notice, then the narrator should not be afraid of the other things that happen unnoticed.

At first glance, these poems seem incredibly dissimilar based on their content. One is about the pain a mother feels at her daughter leaving for the first time, and is essentially about cultivating worry. The other is about releasing worry of the unseen because the unseen can accomplish marvelous things. Still, some similarities do exist between the two poems. Both have a single narrator, and though the reader cannot simply assume from the fact that the poems are authored by women that they are female narrators, the method of description in each poem seems to suggest that the narrators are, indeed, women. Both women's poems seem to be answers to questions that the narrators have asked, but that are not present in the poem. The first seems to answer the question of how one's child can eventually leave when that child was once part of the mother. The second seems to answer the question of, "Why should I worry?" Further, both poems do deal with the aspect of worry, as worry is implied in Olds' poem and dealt with almost directly in Oliver's. Thus, despite the fact that they do seem to contain different messages, or implications, the poems are much more similar than it would seem on first glance.

Still, the poems are also vastly different. While the uniting aspect of the poems is the season of summer, Olds emphasizes the summer's heat, which has connotations of its cruelty, while Oliver emphasizes its fertile capabilities, or summer's more gentile side. The end of Olds' poem, which leaves the reader with the image of "the cab glossy as a slit caul out of which you had slipped, the air glittering electric with escape as it does in the room at birth," certainly emphasizes the unhappiness, the tension, that the reader can feel throughout the poem. While the end of the poem comes to a resolution, suggesting that a child can, really, leave a mother a second time, an event that can be as painful as birth, it leaves no solace for the narrator. Oliver's poem, however, ends with the narrator's positive feelings, her ability to release her worry, as she says, "How should I look at anything in this world and tremble, and grip my hands over my heart? What should I fear?" Thus, Olds' poem seems to imply that there is a reason to worry, especially for mothers, while Oliver's poem suggests that there is not. Thus, the poems, when compared, can almost be read as antithesis of each other.

These antitheses can be further realized through the differences in poetic technique that the author uses. Considering the speaker, readers can notice that Olds' poem features a narrator who is considerably more agitated then Oliver's speaker. The narrator of Olds' poem describes her circumstance as:

…waves of bawling hitting me in hot flashes like some change of life, some boiling wave rising in me toward your body, toward where it should have been on the seat