All about the ancient tribes
In 2012, Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, but was treated and given a “clean bill of health”. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019, at her home in Florida at the age of 83.
The theme of our poem is when death comes, make sure you have lived your life enough for it to take you.
Here is an analysis of the poem When Death Comes by American poet Mary Oliver. Oliver, a highly beloved and well-respected writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for her work, American Primitive, in 1984.
Figurative Language Tone Words: ” When death comes, like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut.” “And each name a comfortable music in the mouth.” -Simile: “Like the hungry bear in autumn.”
What is the greatest gift? Could it be the world itself — the oceans, the meadowlark, the patience of the trees in the wind? Could it be love, with its sweet clamor of passion?
1. “ Wild Geese ” You do not have to be good.
By Mary Oliver like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, We’ve got one more image for death’s approach, this time as a sensation: an iceberg between the shoulder blades. We’ve already seen death as an image, heard that sound of the purse. This comparison is particularly visceral.
The poem ” How It Is” by Maxine Kumin is about the suicide of Anne Sexton, a close friend of Kumin. They were close to one another in age and would routinely share their poems with one another and critique them and even collaborated on several works. Kumin was the last person to see Sexton alive.
But she spent most of her life near a far rockier beach, in the town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she lived, on and off, for more than forty years, with her long-term partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook, who died in 2005.