Mary Oliver
Alligator Poem


I knelt down
at the edge of the water,
and if the white birds standing
in the tops of the trees whistled any warning
I didn’t understand,
I drank up to the very moment it came
crashing toward me,
its tail flailing
like a bundle of swords,
slashing the grass,
and the inside of its cradle-shaped mouth
gaping,
and rimmed with teeth—
and that’s how I almost died
of foolishness
in beautiful Florida.
But I didn’t.
I leaped aside, and fell,
and it streamed past me, crushing everything in its path
as it swept down to the water
and threw itself in,
and, in the end,
this isn’t a poem about foolishness
but about how I rose from the ground
and saw the world as if for the second time,
the way it really is.
The water, that circle of shattered glass,
healed itself with a slow whisper
and lay back
with the back-lit light of polished steel,
and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees,
shook open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away,
while, for a keepsake, and to steady myself,
I reached out,
I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me—
blue stars
and blood-red trumpets
on long green stems—
for hours in my trembling hands they glittered
like fire.


When reading this I was really intrigued about how informal it actually seems, yet it still works. It is almost as if the poem is a short story just in poem form. It is a major turning point when she writes "this isn't a poem about foolishness". At that point the reader realizes that this poem is about a second chance, and then can make the biblical connection to resurection. This poem is really about having a second chance, and realization about how good things actually are until you think they are gone.

In this poem Mary Oliver writes about having a second chance and the importance of realizing what you have. She uses the power and beauty of nature to get this point across. At first the destructive power that nature withholds is portrayed by the alligator. This gator nearly takes the life of the narrator but doesn't. This shows how there is also room for second chances. The beauty of nature is portrayed. After nearly losing her life she see the beauty within her life. Everything seems so different to her, which shows how now through her close experience she has changed so much. This is a useful technique to use: the power held within nature.