Mary Oliver

The Spirit Likes to Dress Up

existence lyric poem reflective

The Spirit Likes to Dress Up - meaning Summary

Spirit Made Bodily

The poem presents the spirit as needing a human body in order to become knowable and fully alive. Rather than remaining abstract or weightless, it chooses physical existence, with appetite, instinct, time, and vulnerability. The body is not treated as a limitation: its ordinary comforts and its painful depths allow spiritual life to appear in the world, joining transcendence to embodied experience.

Read Complete Analyses

The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes, shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morning in the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would rather plumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body, lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body's world, instinct and imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility, to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is -- so it enters us -- in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning; and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0