When Death Comes Mary Oliver

The poem when Death comes by Mary Oliver (1), gives a vivid description of the writer's expectation or level of preparedness for the time when death shall come. This is the preparedness illustrated by the use of the pronoun I. The writer gives an explanation of the inevitability of death. She compares it to a disease, a man purchasing her, an iceberg and also likens it to a hungry bear in autumn. She goes on to tell us what she expects to have done by the time death comes to her. She wants to master the things in her surrounding such that there shall be nothing that is a mystery for her. She does not want to appear to a visitor to the world. The poem is set out in a rural setting where the locals are able to identify items such as the flower in the field being a daisy.

The first theme is the theme of mortality (Shmoop Editorial Team, 32) Mortality here refers to the ending nature of man. Nothing is eternal about the life of a human being. Death ought to come at a certain stage of life. The poet chooses to use the word death five times to show that there is a point that human beings must face it. The use of the word when shows the inevitability of death and that at a particular point in life it shall surely arrive. The idea of death according to the speaker should be an integration of our daily lives experiences. It shows that the one should fully live their lives on earth so that there shall be no form of seemingly one being a visitor on