Oxygen

Oliver begins “Oxygen” by referencing the natural order. Her speaker states that everything needs oxygen to live. While the speaker only uses “it” (Line 1), the title reveals that the “it” (Line 1) is oxygen. The speaker also portrays the soul as a liminal substance that belongs to the body and beyond it. Oliver unifies the soul with muscles and bones. The soul needs air to function, both like an organ and for the organs to support the body it inhabits. At the same time, the soul will eventually leave the earth, unlike a person’s bones and muscles. The soul’s final destination reminds mysterious, as the speaker only states, “while it calls the earth its home” (Line 2). The mysterious, transcendent state of the soul reminds the reader about death. The speaker then pivots, using “so” (Line 3) to connect their observation about oxygen’s necessity with the “noisy machine” (Line 3) in their house. Oliver shows the machine aids with breathing through the “so” (Line 3) conjunction and the description, “lung-like” (Line 4). The word “merciful” (Line 3) especially places the machine’s function as essential despite its annoying noise.

The speaker hears the machine pumping oxygen as they tend the fire. Because oxygen machines cannot be near open flames, the reader can assume the speaker is not the one using the machine. Oliver’s placement of the oxygen machine’s noise and the fire in the same stanza also gives readers two subtle messages. The machine is one piece of the speaker’s unified life and home. Since the device does its merciful job while the fire burns, the fire gains a healing quality from the association.

Oliver draws connections between the human body and the inanimate throughout the poem. The speaker moves the logs so they can “lie more loosely” (Line 8). In the following line, the speaker introduces the lover sitting upstairs. As with the logs, Oliver uses positioning to describe the lover. The lover leans on her “right shoulder which aches / all day” (Lines 10-11). Leaning is halfway to lying down, an association that is emphasized in the “L” alliteration of these lines. The aching right shoulder and the lean together make the lover seem tight, uncomfortable, and cramped. Is it a sign that the speaker needs to stir her lover to get her to “lie more loosely?” (Line 8). Or has the speaker already done what is possible to care for the ailing lover?

Fire needs oxygen to ignite. Opening up space between the logs allows the flames to take in oxygen and grow. Despite the pain, the lover still breathes. Perhaps, the speaker’s fire-tending pantomimes turning on the lover’s oxygen machine earlier, helping the partner continue to ‘burn’ with life. In the seventh stanza, the fire’s re-vitalization comes after the speaker moves the logs around. The speaker confirms that the fire “feeds / as we all do, as we must” on the air (Lines 22-23). Oliver uses the fire and the “we” pronoun to show that the fire and the lover need the same care to thrive.

In caring for their lover, the speaker also tends to their own life. The speaker states that their lives are so connected that they do not know how to be apart. “And what does this have to do / with love,” the speaker asks (Lines 17-18). In Oliver’s vision, love functions as a form of unity and reciprocity. The speaker cares for the lover’s physical well-being. The fire, which represents the lover, cares for the speaker’s emotional health by offering up roses and beauty. The lovers possess a unified, seemingly inseparable existence. Even as the speaker recognizes that life on earth is finite, the sense of unity allows them and others to find “quietude, or maybe gratitude” (Line 22) in small, shared moments.

Oliver extends this love to the reader too. She unifies the reader and the speaker through gender-neutral pronouns and the second-person address. Oliver strove to capture universal experiences in her poetry. “I wanted the ‘I’ to be the possible reader, rather than myself,” she once told journalist, Krista Tippett. Her poems could be about “experiences that happened to be mine but could well have been anybody else’s” (Tippett, Krista. “Mary Oliver—‘I Got Saved by the Beauty of the World.’” The On Being Project, February 5, 2015).

While “Oxygen” feels rooted in Oliver’s time, probably caring for her ill partner, Oliver leaves the speaker and her companion unnamed. By leaving the characters’ names out and only using gender-neutral pronouns such as “you” (Line 8) and “my” (Line 15), Oliver gives readers the space to find and project their experiences onto the poem. Her choice in leaving the speaker ambiguous also reenforces the poem’s thematic focus on unity, love, and loss.