"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Mary Oliver was an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s poetry focused on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin also noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award for lifetime achievement. Reviewing Dream Work (1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.”
Mary Oliver was born and raised in Maple Hills Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She would retreat from a difficult home to the nearby woods, where she would build huts of sticks and grass and write poems. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.”
Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’ ... into the world of historical and personal suffering. ... She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.”
The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms was also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award. The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems were almost always oriented toward nature, but they seldom examined the self and were almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appeared constantly in her later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
Oliver continued her celebration of the natural world in her next collections, including Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry magazine contributor Richard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.”
A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver routinely published a new book every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully conferred subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition. … At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’” Her last books included A Thousand Mornings (2012), Dog Songs (2013), Blue Horses (2014), Felicity (2015), Upstream: Selected Essays (2016), and Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (2017).
Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.
Oliver lived in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Hobe Sound, Florida, until her death in early 2019. She was 83.
Oh! Rowan tree, oh! Rowan tree, Thou'lt aye be dear to me, En twin'd thou art wi' mony ties O' hame and infancy. Thy leaves were aye the first o' spring, Thy flow'rs the simmer's pride; There was na sic a bonnie tree In a' the countrie side. Oh! rowan tree.
How fair wert thou in simmer time, Wi' a' thy clusters white, How rich and gay thy autumn dress, Wi' berries red and bright. On thy fair stem were mony names, Which now nae mair I see; But thy're engraven on my heart, Forgot they ne'er can be. Oh! rowan tree.
We sat aneath thy spreading shade, The bairnies round thee ran, They pu'd thy bonnie berries red, And necklaces they strang; My mither, oh! I see her still, She smiled our sports to see, Wi' little Jeanie on her lap, And Jamie on her knee. Oh!, Rowan tree.
Oh! there arose my father's prayer In holy evening's calm; How sweet was then my mother's voice In the Martyr's psalm! Now a'are gane! We meet nae mair Aneath the rowan tree, But hallowed thoughts around thee Turn o'hame and infancy. Oh! Rowan tree.
Scots Vocabulary & Translation Notes
The following Scots words and phrases appear in the poem and may help modern readers better appreciate its meaning and emotional tone.
Scots Word
/PhraseModern Translation
aye
always
mony
many
o’ hame
of home
infancy
childhood / early youth
simmer
summer
na sic
no such
bonnie
beautiful / lovely
countrie side
countryside
nae mair
no more
aneath
beneath
bairnies
little children
pu’d
pulled / picked
strang
strung
mither
mother
a’ are gane
all are gone
meet nae mair
meet no more
hallowed thoughts
sacred or blessed memories
Martyr’s psalm
likely a reference to a solemn Scottish psalm tune associated with worship and remembrance
Additional Notes
The rowan tree (a type of mountain ash) held special significance in Scottish and Celtic culture, often symbolizing protection, remembrance, and the sacredness of home.
The repeated refrain “Oh! Rowan tree” functions almost like a song chorus or prayerful invocation, reinforcing the poem’s tone of longing and remembrance.
Lady Nairne intentionally wrote in Scots dialect to preserve the emotional warmth, musicality, and cultural memory of Scottish rural life.
A Scottish Folk Song written by Perthshire-born Carolina Oliphant, known as Lady Nairne, 1766-1845. The song, Rowan Tree, who was a song writer and collector of Scottish songs. The Rowan Tree appeared in R. A. Smith's Scottish Minstrel (1822).
Lady Nairne was a song collector and wrote some of Scotland's best-known songs. Some of her songs and prose have been attributed to Robert Burns, Walter Scott or James Hogg.
Wikipedia - Nairne concealed her achievements as a songwriter throughout her life; they only became public on the posthumous publication of "Lays from Strathearn" (1846). She took pleasure in the popularity of her songs, and may have been concerned that this could be jeopardised if it became public knowledge that she was a woman. It also explains why she soon switched from Mrs Bogan of Bogan to the gender-neutral BB when submitting her contributions to The Scottish Minstrel, and even disguised her handwriting. On one occasion, pressed by her publisher Purdie who wanted to meet his best contributor, she appeared disguised as an elderly gentlewoman from the country. She succeeded in persuading Purdie that she was merely a conduit for the songs she gathered from simple countryfolk, and not their author. But the entire editorial committee of the Minstrel – all of them female – was aware of her identity for instance, as were her sister, nieces and grandniece. On the other hand, she shared her secret with very few men, not even her husband; as she wrote to a friend in the 1820s "I have not told even Nairne lest he blab".
Consideration for her husband may have been another of Nairne's motives for maintaining her anonymity. Despite his Jacobite family background he had served with the British Army since his youth, and it might have caused him some professional embarrassment if it had become widely known that his wife was writing songs in honour of the Jacobite rebels of the previous century. Somewhat testifying against that view however is that she maintained her secrecy for fifteen years after his death.
The "Rowan Tree" is a beautiful, and deeply nostalgic, Scottish poem of memory - not merely is it about a tree - but of home, childhood, family, loss, and sacred remembrance. The rowan becomes a living archive of relational existence, preserving within its branches and shadow the lingering presence of love, belonging, and the sacred continuity of remembered life..
Introduction
“The Rowan Tree” is one of the most beloved songs and poems of Scottish sentimental literature. Written in Scots dialect by Lady Nairne in the early nineteenth century, the poem combines personal memory, ruralimagery, religious devotion, and grief into a meditation on the sacredness of home and the irreversible passage of time.
The poem is deceptively simple. Beneath its pastoral surface lies a profound emotional structure:
the rowan tree as memory,
the family as sacred community,
childhood as lost Eden,
and remembrance as an act of spiritual continuity.
The repeated refrain — “Oh! rowan tree” — functions almost liturgically, as though the speaker is praying to memory itself.
I. The Rowan Tree as Symbol
The rowan tree (mountain ash) carries deep cultural meaning in Scottish and Celtic traditions.
Traditionally, rowan trees symbolized:
protection,
ancestral memory,
home,
spiritual safeguarding,
continuity between generations.
In folklore, rowans were often planted near homes to ward off evil spirits or misfortune. Lady Nairne subtly draws on this cultural background.
But in the poem the rowan becomes something larger:
a living archive of relational existence.
The tree remembers what time destroys.
Its bark once held carved names.
Its branches shaded children at play.
Its presence witnessed prayer, play, motherhood, and family fellowship.
The rowan thus functions almost sacramentally by mediating personal, family, and community memory.
II. Home and Infancy
The opening stanza immediately establishes the emotional center:
“En twin’d thou art wi’ mony ties O’ hame and infancy.”
The tree is not merely associated with childhood — it is entwined with it.
The word “ties” is crucial.
The poem’s emotional force depends upon relational interconnectedness:
family,
place,
memory,
seasons,
identity.
The self is shown to emerge from belonging.
This is one reason the poem remains emotionally powerful - it reflects a universal truth that identity is rooted in remembered relations.
In contemporary philosophical language - especially through a process-relational or Whiteheadian lens - the poem suggests that the self is not isolated substance but accumulated relational continuity.
The rowan tree becomes the persistence of those relations across time.
III. Nature and Temporal Cycles
The poem moves through the seasons:
spring leaves,
summer blossoms,
autumn berries.
This seasonal progression mirrors the human lifecycle:
NatureHuman Meaning
Spring leavesChildhood Summer flowersVitality and family flourishing Autumn berriesAging, ripeness, memory Winter (implied absence)Death and loss
Importantly, winter is never directly named.
Its absence intensifies the grief.
The poem remains suspended in remembrance -
unwilling to speak the full finality of death directly.
This restraint gives the poem dignity and tenderness.
IV. Memory Inscribed Upon the Heart
One of the poem’s most beautiful lines reads:
“But thy’re engraven on my heart”
The names carved into the tree have disappeared physically, but remain inwardly preserved.
This movement from external inscription to internal memory is central.
The poem suggests:
material things fade,
living relations vanish,
but memory persists as inward continuity.
This is remarkably close to what later phenomenology and process philosophy would call persistence-through-relational-patterning.
The heart becomes the final archive of meaning.
V. Family as Sacred Community
The third and fourth stanzas shift from landscape into communal life.
Children play beneath the tree.
The mother watches lovingly.
The father prays in evening calm.
The domestic world is presented almost liturgically.
Especially important is this line:
“How sweet was then my mother’s voice In the Martyr’s psalm!”
Religion here is not institutional power or doctrine.
It is woven into:
evening peace,
parental affection,
song,
home,
shared ritual.
The sacred emerges through ordinary relational life.
This gives the poem extraordinary warmth.
Faith is not abstract theology.
It is embodied memory.
VI. Grief and the Passage of Time
The emotional climax arrives quietly:
“Now a’ are gane!”
Three devastating words.
Everyone is gone.
No dramatic lament follows. Instead, the poem settles into sacred remembrance.
This restraint is profoundly Scottish in tone: emotion is deepened through understatement.
The final stanza transforms grief into reverence.
The rowan tree becomes:
memorial,
witness,
shrine,
surviving companion.
The speaker cannot return to childhood, but memory allows participation in its lingering presence.
The Scottish Rowan Tree
VII. A Whiteheadian / Process-Relational Reading
From a process-relational perspective, the poem becomes especially rich.
The rowan tree symbolizes:
continuity amidst becoming,
relational persistence,
identity through memory,
embodiment of past experience.
The family no longer exists materially, yet their relational presence persists within the speaker’s ongoing becoming.
The poem therefore resists pure annihilation.
The past is not dead;
it remains active within present feeling.
This closely parallels Alfred North Whitehead’s idea that experience is preserved through relational inheritance.
In this reading:
the tree is a nexus of remembered occasions,
memory is relational continuity,
and grief itself becomes evidence that love persists beyond physical absence.
The poem’s holiness lies precisely there.
VIII. Why the Poem Endures
“The Rowan Tree” endures because it touches universal human experiences:
longing for home,
remembrance of parents,
childhood innocence,
sacred domesticity,
grief over time’s passing.
Its power comes from emotional sincerity rather than complexity.
The poem never argues.
It remembers.
And through remembering, it preserves what would otherwise disappear.
That is why the final refrain feels less like nostalgia and more like invocation:
