The poems in Mary Oliver's White Pine form a jagged graph of interactions between the human sphere and surrounding nature. From poem to poem the degree of contact varies from sight to touch to conscious attempts to merge. Human presence is acknowledged or ignored, but the superb indifference of morning glories that tangle a grain field, the happy foraging of her dogs, or the death of a sea mouse all demand the poet's attention. "To pay attention," she says, "is our endless and proper work" and it is in the act of paying attention, and in her reports on that activity, that Oliver works out why it is our proper work (Yes! No! 8).
Human consciousness is the thin, sometimes permeable, but always incredibly strong layer that separates the human being from the rest of nature. Like the attributes of any creature, consciousness of the human sort compels certain behaviors and one of these is to pay attention. This attention encompasses the compulsion to use all of our senses in interacting with the world around us. But, unlike the hummingbirds who stop and stare at the poet sitting in their tree, human consciousness carries the heavier burden of reflection. Assessment and reaction are there in other creatures. Poets in trees, in the judgment of a maternal hummingbird, seem to be harmless things but should be treated with caution. In the human act of attention hummingbirds are not, however, shrugged off the way the deer is indifferent to the leaves growing on its antlers or in the way the 'possum "sighed, and shook itself [and] minced away" once the poet and her dogs moved on (Opossum 24). Indeed, the human being who fully pays attention can, as Oliver does, imagine what the 'possum did after she had departed; can experience emotions evoked by the beauty of the hummingbirds; and can get "a hint of the truth" from her glimpse of the "fountain of leaves" carried on the antlers of a deer's "elaborate head" (December 51). Thus, with t...