"After Reading Lucretius...": Mary Oliver in Conversation with Lucretius

Philosophical poetry, the problem of death, and Mary Oliver's triumph over Lucretius

Apr 07, 2025

Welcome to this week’s edition of Reading Art!

It finally feels like spring in Los Angeles, which might be a funny thing to say considering that the weather is basically always the same here (unless it isn’t, of course). But there’s a brightness to the sky and a crispness to the air that winter simply does not have, and all the colors of the trees and flowers seem more saturated than they did even a few weeks ago.

In PhD news, I sent in my completed dissertation draft to my committee members! I’m proud of the work I’ve done to get the first round edits completed, and hope my professors like it too. They more or less have to, ha, since I have a Dissertation Year Fellowship and therefore must file in June or face dire consequences. The dissertation is obviously not done yet, but getting it off my desk feels like a breath of fresh air that feels appropriate for the time of year.

At Getty, one of my amazing colleagues hosts a monthly poetry reading group, and March’s pick was a collection of Mary Oliver’s poetry from across her long career. I had seen a lot of her poetry excerpted and quoted all across the internet (What will you do with your one wild and precious life!!!!) until—or so it seemed in my ignorance—she had become a cliche, the poetry version of Live Laugh Love.

To nobody’s surprise (yes, I’ve finally caught up with the rest of the world), Oliver is even better and even more delightful than the small and inspiring snippets of her work that are splashed across Pinterest and Instagram.

Her especially great and well-known works, like “Wild Geese,” were even better to read in their full form. Don’t get me wrong, I love a commonplace book as much as the next person, but there was something surprisingly refreshing about reading oft-quoted material in its full context, like the antidote to breakneck Internet trends and the hurried pace of modern life. When I take in a work of art—and poetry certainly counts, just as much as painting or sculpture—I find myself wanting the full picture and not just the brief excerpt.

Mary Oliver and the Ancient Philosophical Tradition

As someone who works on the ancient Mediterranean, one poem in particular caught my eye: “After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond.” For this week’s virtual gallery tour, we’re going to be jumping across mediums, from poetry to art, exploring the nuanced ways in which ancient philosophy continues to resonate across time periods. What did Oliver think of Lucretius? What does Lucretius have to do with contemporary poetry? How relevant is the ancient past to the modern present? We’ll explore all of this questions and more in today’s newsletter.

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After Reading Lucretius, I Go to the Pond

The poem reads as follows:

The slippery green frog
that went to his death
in the heron's pink throat
was my small brother,
and the heron
with the white plumes
like a crown on his head
who is washing now his great sword-beak
in the shining pond
is my tall thin brother.
My heart dresses in black
and dances.

The title is a tease; there’s no actual mention of Lucretius in this poem, nor does it, at first glance, answer critical questions: which part of Lucretius did Oliver read, and when, and why? Why did she go to the pond afterward? What did she actually think of Lucretius? Did she like his philosophy, and did she agree with its teachings?

Lucretius: Between Poetry and Philosophy

To answer these questions, let’s pause on Oliver for the time being and consider who exactly Lucretius was. He was an ancient Roman who lived in the first century BCE, and is responsible for producing an epic six-book poem called De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), which explains about the principles of Epicurean philosophy, a school that had been founded nearly 300 years before Lucretius’ time, and hundreds of miles away from Rome, in Athens. Its main teaching is that pleasure is the highest of all and the ultimate telos, goal, of our lives. To compare, other schools, such as Stoicism, contended that things like virtue were the goal of human life. But for an Epicurean, none of those other possibilities matter if they make us miserable.

Now, to be sure, Epicureanism takes a narrower view of pleasure than simple hedonism: it’s actually what they called ataraxia, the state of being undisturbed: pleasure is tranquillity.

The school also had a strong natural science component: it posited that everything was “atoms and void,” including the human soul, which breaks apart upon death and is then recycled into something else; the personality does not live on. If there are gods, says Epicurus, they do not care for mortal life, and live somewhere far away in a state of happiness that is sublime and absolute.

These points are a bit of a problem for ancient critics. Why would the gods exist so separately from us? How can we embrace pleasure knowing that life is completely finite? (Of course, many have come up with rebuttals and counterpoints and all that, but that’s a topic for another time.)

Very few details of Lucretius’ life can be confirmed, and unfortunately none of them seem very Epicurean. According to Jerome’s Chronicon, he seems to have lived a sad and tragic life that resulted in him drinking a love potion (reason unknown) and then ending his own life sometime in his mid-forties, in a state of despair seemingly anathema to the ideal life of Epicurean pleasure.

Here’s Lucretius in a manuscript, pointing up at the sky. He’s gesturing at a beam of sunlight that is illuminating dust particles, a metaphor he uses in Book 2 of DRN to describe how atoms exist in empty space, the void.

He looks so much more peaceful and beatific than his brief and fractured biographies ever suggested. He also looks older than the 44 years he supposedly had on this earth. Interestingly, he’s wearing the laurel wreath that, in antiquity, marked a celebrated poet—for Lucretius was not simply a philosopher, but also a poet, putting the wisdom of the past into neat dactylic hexameters, the poetic meter of epic poets Homer and Hesiod.

Indeed, Lucretius is as much an artist as he is a philosopher. He claims to have written a poem so that the boring and complex philosophical teachings he introduces (ok, fine, he didn’t put it in these exact terms) will be easier for his readers to digest, just as adults give children medicine mixed with honey so that they’ll agree to swallow it (DRN 1.1.931-50; cf. 4.8-25).

But I think that Lucretius had more in mind. If neither body nor soul exists after death, the one who loves life will have to come up with a better solution for immortality: art. More specifically, in his case, the immortal art of poetry.

Back to Mary Oliver

I think that Lucretius was appealing to Oliver for a couple of reasons, and not just because of his Epicurean teachings: Oliver was also aware of the immortality that poetry gives the artist even when the body naturally fails and, besides, the world is full of death—the heron must eat the frog to survive. Oliver, like Lucretius, sees the breaking apart of all the atoms of the world and sees that those atoms might rearrange into something else, like a nutritious meal for the kingly heron.

But Epicureanism’s natural science aspect might also have appealed to Oliver; in her works, the natural world frequently features as the setting and/or main focus of the poem. Oliver’s walk to the pond is full of color and texture: the pink of the heron’s throat, the slippery green of the frog, the self-described black of Oliver’s own heart.

Even the reflection in the pond is itself Epicurean; in various Epicurean texts, the optics of reflection are described as streams of atoms beaming down from the original object and casting an image on the water. Water in general was also of interest to Epicureans, who saw it as an unpredictable and even dangerous thing, even as its capacity to sate thirst made it an instrument of pleasure. Here, in Oliver’s poetic microcosm, the reflection of the water shows a gory scene, but one that is actually completely in tune with the rhythms of the nature of things. Herons eat frogs. Both are kindred spirits to the poetic subject. Such is life.

Oliver’s response to Lucretius seems similar but is actually strikingly different to other examples of Lucretian reception. For example, going way back to the late fifteenth century, Piero di Cosimo’s The Return from the Hunt was, as scholars have argued, inspired by Lucretius’ emphasis on the human and not on the divine.

Piero di Cosimo, The Return from the Hunt. 1495-1500 | Met

In the painting, humans are returning from a hunt—that is, from killing animals for food, just as the heron has done with the frog. Yet the painting has a rather different tone to Oliver’s poem. There are swarms of humans, stark in their paleness against the dark of the palette, seeming to be a celebration of mankind’s victory over the natural world. Lucretius’ work banishes the gods; let humanity get the credit, then, for setting the world in order, Cosimo seems to suggest.

In sharp contrast, it is not the divine that Oliver’s poem banishes, but the human. Yes, there might be some agreement with Lucretius that the cycle of life and death is not something to be grieved endlessly but rather must be understood as a necessary part of how things work here on this earth. But Oliver triumphs ultimately in her rejection of Lucretius: she replaces him with herself as the authority, the poet-philosopher who celebrates life in a completely different way. After the title, there is no more mention of Lucretius at all, only the poetic I. Aligned with Lucretius for a moment, Oliver smoothly transcends him, yet recognizes something in his conflicted desire for tranquility. I wonder if she knew he was reported to have died by suicide. There’s something so empathetic in this poem that it makes me think she did. Just as Oliver writes to us in the present day, she also writes back to Lucretius, assuring him of life’s continuation and continuing beauty, assuring him that there is a spark of something more inside the atoms that make up bodies.

She redefines and re-divines Lucretian thought in only a few lines.

What could be more sublime? What better way to read the words of antiquity than to transmute them into something that feels even more true to us? After all, any act of reception is bound up in our own identities and senses of the world, and that’s the beautiful thing: there are practically as many versions of an ancient text as there are readers.

Thank you for reading this week’s newsletter!

Mary Oliver’s reading of Lucretius seems to have encouraged her to read the world in a whole new way—just not 100% the way in which Lucretius presents the world. He inspires the poet to a more complete understanding of nature that is all her own, but he is not the ultimate authority. Oliver is! And, therefore, so are all of us, when we too take the role of an active observer of the world around us.

Or maybe Oliver found Lucretius too dry to deal with and went out into the world on her own to look with her own eyes! Who knows? There are so many possible interpretations of this incredibly poignant poem.

Take care until next time,

MKA

Reading Art