The Poet With His Face In His Hands By Mary Oliver Analysis

In her poem entitled “The Poet with His Face in His Hands,” Mary Oliver utilizes the voice of her work’s speaker to dismiss and belittle those poets who focus on their own misery in their writings. Although the poem models itself a scolding, Oliver wrote the work as a poem with the purpose of delivering an argument against the usage of depressing, personal subject matters for poetry. Oliver’s intention is to dissuade her fellow poets from promoting misery and personal mistakes in their works, and she accomplishes this task through her speaker’s diction and tone, the imagery, setting, and mood created within the content of the poem itself, and the incorporation of such persuasive structures as enjambment and juxtaposition to bolster the poem’s

Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the

To that end, the overall structure of the poem has relied heavily on both enjambment and juxtaposition to establish and maintain the contrast. At first read, the impact of enjambment is easily lost, but upon closer inspection, the significant created through each interruption becomes evident. Notably, every usage of enjambment, which occurs at the end of nearly every line, emphasizes an idea, whether it be the person at fault for “your / mistakes” (1-2) or the truth that “the world / doesn’t need” (2-3) a poet’s misery. Another instance of enjambment serves to transition the poem’s focus from the first poet to the thrush, emphasizing how, even as the poet “[drips] with despair all afternoon,” the thrush, “still, / on a green branch… [sings] / of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything” (14-18). In this case, the effect created by the enjambment of “still” emphasizes the juxtaposition of the two scenes. The desired effect, of course, is to depict the songbird as the better of the two, and, to that end, the structure fulfills its purpose