Mary Oliver's "Seven White Butterflies" and "West Wind 2" Analysis

Introduction

Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of modern literature, is not only keenly attuned to nature but uses it to inspire her readers as well. She neither admonishes nor discriminates against those who do not share her view. Like most Romantic poets, she creates a boundary between nature and humanity, and attempts to explain — through vivid examples — principles by which one can live. In her poems "Seven White Butterflies" and "West Wind 2," Oliver demonstrates that people need to learn from nature a life free from the struggle for material gain or the weight of dejection. She further suggests that humanity is part of nature, and that struggling against the stream of life will not resolve the dilemmas one faces. These ideas are eloquently analogized and presented in both poems, which are discussed below.

Analysis of the Poems

The poem "Seven White Butterflies" is a reflection on its subject. Oliver takes a simplistic approach, opening with these lines:

"Seven white butterflies ... delicate in a hurry look ... how they bang the pages ... of their wings as they fly."

In these first few lines, Oliver uses simple language to establish the nature of butterflies — their antics and the sum of their existence. They flutter in a hurry, they struggle endlessly for freedom, and "they bang the pages" in the process. By nature they possess the "wisdom" to seek and find their means in the "fields of mustard yellow," and it is this same wisdom that leads them to the "brassy stem" with a "yellow thumb" — their food. In this way, the butterflies — symbolically identified by the lucky number seven — are depicted as fortunate to live a carefree life, even though they must from time to time struggle against captivity and survive alongside human beings.

The reader cannot help but absorb Oliver's musings on butterflies and compare them with nature's way of preserving what is good in an environment filled with threats to survival.

Oliver's other poem, "West Wind 2," also addresses the theme of struggle. The poet opens with an advisory tone, cautioning someone young — perhaps in their late teens or early twenties — about the struggles one must face in life. This is evident in these lines:

"You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me."

Again Oliver uses nature to compare the journey of life with a journey along a river stream. Life, according to Oliver, is a series of struggles — whether for a loved one, something inanimate like a "scuffed shoe," or one's pet dog. All these struggles, she suggests, would prove meaningless in the end: "When you hear, a mile / away and still out of sight, the churn of the water" — at that moment one realizes that every struggle should be directed toward something concrete and inevitable, such as death and what lies beyond, rather than toward the material things of this world.

An overview of "West Wind 2" confirms that Oliver tends to use nature to draw comparisons with human life. This characteristic — of placing humans alongside, rather than apart from, nature — is inherent among the Romantic poets. What differentiates Oliver from the rest is her attitude and approach to her subject. She does not reprimand humanity for its ill effects on nature but rather advises; nor does she segregate nature from humanity, but instead uses it to analogize life with nature's processes. These qualities are evident in both poems.

In "West Wind 2," for example, she cautions her subject with these words:

"when you hear that unmistakable pounding — when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming — then row, row for your life toward it."

In these lines the poet first builds a suspenseful crescendo and then arrives at a climax with her ultimate counsel: "then row, row for your life toward it." She uses the term "long falls" to analogize the end of human life, symbolically depicting that life is as brief as a journey on a river that ends at a waterfall. A boat rower, after all, does not have much choice but to row toward it.

Symbolism and Imagery in Seven White Butterflies

In "Seven White Butterflies," Oliver adopts the same principle — comparing how butterflies are luckier than the humans who strive to contain nature. Butterflies, as a symbolic representation of nature, are always free from these threats because nature endows them with the wisdom to extricate themselves from captivity or death. Oliver employs an idolizing and reflective tone through the allusion to Blake and Whitman to establish authority in this conviction and to affirm her rationale.

Similarly, the title "Seven White Butterflies" signals from the outset how these butterflies are metaphorically used to depict the purity of nature, while the number seven, as mentioned earlier, represents luck. These opening terms, and others woven throughout the poem — "gold all eternity," "dancers floating," "banter," and "golden towers" — clearly establish that Oliver's central aim is to make the reader feel how nature is free of the worries that humanity tends to load upon itself in a materialistic world. The butterflies are not worried about a "scuffed shoe," a pet dog, or even a "bent penny," as presented in "West Wind 2." In "Seven White Butterflies," the reader is invited to feel nature as it truly is — filled with golden opportunities to live and act as one wishes without disturbing the balance of life.