Poetry- Close Analysis

Overlooked: An Analysis of
Mary Oliver’s “Ghosts”

The poem begins with the haunting reproof, “Have you noticed” (28) which suggests that the reader has not been paying attention to the current state or change of something rather important. Through this repeated statement, Mary Oliver accuses her reader of blindness and apathy in her poem, “Ghosts”. Although not explicitly stated, Mary Oliver warns that the transfer of the American heartland from Native Americans into the hands of the white man has erased something beautiful from the face of the nation. Oliver is referring to the loss of nature.
This loss is attributed to the white Americans who desecrated the country in the early nineteenth century. In her third section Oliver notes that in 1805 Lewis watched as the chicks of sparrows huddled together after having “left the perfect world and fallen, / helpless and blind / into the flowered fields and the perils / of this one” (29). The chicks’ descent into the harsh ground, far from their nest, is symbolic of America’s descent from Native American sacred homeland, to an industrializing new people. It is apparent that Oliver is referring to this descent in the fact that she alludes to Meriwether Lewis, the famous explorer who is credited with making possible the white immigration to the West. The phrase “Have you noticed” is repeated because although Lewis did appreciate and notice his surroundings, Oliver is under the impression that the reader hasn’t and stands blindly by as the unbeknownst memory of “so many million powerful bawling beasts / [who] lay down on the earth and died” haunts us (28) .

Later, in the fifth section, Oliver notes that rich Americans in the nineteenth century would shoot buffalo from train windows and leave the carcasses which “stank unbelievable, and sang with flies, ribboned / with slopes of white fat, / black ropes of blood – hellhunks” (29). Such revolting imagery is used not only to describe the rotting corpses, but also the disgusting effects of the train passengers’ actions. Thus, the reader comes to see the white culture as indifferent, rash, and disgusting.

Native Americans, however, may be seen in a different light. The entire culture is melded into the poem as symbolic of a fluid symbiosis with nature: “Have you noticed? how the rain / falls soft as the fall / of moccasins” (28-29). This comparison implies that the Native Americans’ footfalls did not harm the land, but gave it life and nourishment akin to the cleansing rain. Oliver’s continuing “Have you noticed?” here gives the reader the sense of what they have done wrong in direct comparison with what the Indians had done right. Native American culture has also been greatly affected by white culture, and Oliver seems to be mourning the loss of that culture in her poem, using the loss of buffalo as symbolic of the demise of the Indian tribes. The buffalo are given a Native American personification when Oliver states that the herds stood “moon after moon / in their tribal circle” (30).

At the end of all of this, however, it is important to remember that Oliver ends her poem of death with a story of birth. The lost buffalo is symbolically reborn as a cow “with the tenderness of any caring woman, / […] gave birth / to a red calf” (30). This rebirth may also symbolize the repentance of her own culture; earlier in the poem, Oliver notes, “In the book of the earth is it written: / nothing can die” which is followed by the idea of the Sioux that things do not die, they merely hide (29). Thus, we may see that the culture is still alive somewhere and they, unlike us, may “make room” so that we may share their “wild domains” (30).

Not sure if I need a more conciliatory statement to conclude.