Mary Oliver's "Beside the Waterfall"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) , an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterized by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today is Friday,
0:06.0	September 8, 2023. Today's poem is by Mary Oliver, who was an American poet, who was born
0:13.6	in September 10, 1935, and died in January of 2019. Her birthday is this weekend, so it seemed like
0:20.4	the right time to do a poem by her.
0:23.3	She, of course, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and is one of the
0:27.3	best-selling, best-known poets in the last 25 to 50 years.
0:33.4	And the poem that I'm going to read today, I think, is an example of why she is beloved.
0:38.9	It's called Beside the Waterfall.
0:40.9	I'll read it once.
0:41.8	I'll offer a few comments and then read it one more time and that will be today's episode.
0:46.7	Beside the waterfall.
0:50.0	At dawn, the big dog, Winston by name, reached down into the leaves, tulips and willows mostly,
0:58.4	beside the white waterfall, dragged out into plain sight a fawn.
1:04.2	It was scarcely larger than a rabbit, and thankfully it was dead.
1:09.2	Winston looked over the delicate spotted body,
1:11.5	and then deftly tackled the beautiful flower-like head,
1:15.0	breaking it and breaking it off and swallowing it.
1:19.2	All the while this was happening, it was growing later.
1:22.7	When I called to him, Winston merely looked up,
1:26.1	grizzled around the chin and with kind eyes, he too, if you're
1:30.7	willing, had a face like a flower. And then the red sun, which had been rising all the while
1:37.8	anyway, broke clear of the trees and dropped its wild, clawed light over everything.
	...

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