Closer to Nature in Death

When first reading May Swenson’s poem I Will Lie Down I began to wonder if the speaker is mindful or not to the environment around her. I also began think on how the nature may correlate with the speaker.  Towards the end of the poem I began to realize that in death she seems the closest to nature and perhaps as she lays there she feels closer to nature. 

In Swenson’s poem the speaker seems to know what is going on around her but she doesn’t seem to appreciate it.  This is most apparent in the fifth stanza as the speaker states, “I will sleep face down in the burnt meadow no hearing the sound of water over stones.”   She knows that there is a water source near her since she mentions it, however she does hear the sound of the water, whether it is because she is too far away or for what I believe is that she doesn’t want to hear it and is blocking out the sound.  I came to this conclusion because in the poem the speaker states that she slept face down.  Sleeping faced down she is not able to see what is going around her and yet she knows about the environment around her.  After seeing everything around her, she chose to lie face down and when doing so she chose not to acknowledge what was going on around her was more concerned about her own death.

The nature in the poem relates most to the fact that the speaker is dying.  In the last stanza of the poem the speaker states, “Let snow hide the whiteness of my bones.”  The snow covering her bones suggest the association between her death and winter.  This then connects the speaker waiting to death to overtake her, to the season of autumn.  Autumn can be considered the age before death since many plants begin to die off or prepare for hibernation before the winter.  I believe that Swenson used the seasons to show the relationship between the speaker waiting death since both autumn and the speaker prepare for the next stage in life whether it be winter or the end of life.

The speaker though out the poem seems to be the closest to nature as her life comes to an end.  Even though she doesn’t to acknowledge the environment around her she still seems very close to nature in the way she dies.  There are many environments that the speaker could be preparing to die in such as at home in bed or in a hospital, however she decides to die peacefully within nature.  Nature often has peaceful qualities and dyeing within nature gives her death a peaceful attribute.  I believe that she may have wished to be closer to nature and that is why she prepared to die here.  Perhaps by dying in nature she could become one with it before she took her last breath. 

I really enjoyed reading I will Lie Down because of the correlation between nature and death.  For me the poem creates the sense that death can be beautiful because of its balance between the peaceful atmosphere of nature and the darker undertones of death from the speaker.  This would be a poem to keep analyzing to understand more on how nature and the speaker’s death relates.  I am still curious if the speaker may actually wish she was closer to nature in her life and that is why she decided to be closer to nature in death.  

References:

Swenson, M. (2003). I Will Lie Down. In L. Anderson, Sisters of The Earth (Second ed., p. 53). New York: Vintage Books.