Summary

The poems collected from A Thousand Mornings, Swan, and Evidence fall into similar patterns to those of the previous sections. Oliver talks about nature and her deep connection to it in fairly explicit terms. One of the other characteristic aspects of this period of her writing is that she talks about age in a way that the poems written at the end of her life do not.

A Thousand Mornings begins with the poem “I Go Down To The Shore.” Oliver’s speaker addresses the sea, looking for solutions to her human problems, and the response she gets from the ocean is, “Excuse me, I have work to do” (8). The ocean does its beautiful, natural, and inexorable work, and Oliver’s human concerns have no effect on it, although nature has a profound effect on Oliver. The poems in A...