A Near Death Experience Essay

How close-fitting have you start to dying? What nourish do you place on your own animation? Mary Oliver poses these very(prenominal) deep and thought-provoking questions to the reader in her shortstop poem, gator Poem.In the poem, the persona has an buzz off in which she comes very close to close an gator walks by her as she drank some water divulge of a river while sitting on a riverbank. Oliver describes it in this government agency I didnt understand/I drank up to the very secondment it came/crashing toward me/its tail flailing/ like a bundle of swords/slashing the grass/and the interior of its cradle-shaped mouth/gaping/and rimmed with teeth and/thats how I intimately died/of foolishness/in pretty-pretty Florida.Clearly she has had a near-death experience. The language employ in describing that passage orients true fear tail flailing/like a bundle of swords/slashing the grass. This experience has exposed the persona to the very received possibilities of death.Thi s experience also was most likely the personas land-class near-death experience. Oliver indicates this with the statement thats how I almost died/of foolishness/in beautiful Florida. People who have many near-death experiences usually always exercise wariness in situations that could be fatal. In this situation, she walked directly up to the river bank and stuck her perfume in, and started drinking (I didnt understand/I drank up to the very moment it came).The rest of the poem goes on to show how the persona changed and reacted from this near-death experience. She distinctly takes a new value for life away from her first near-death experience but about how I rose from the ground/and saw the world as if for the second time/the way it really is. The transformation that she shows after the experience can be attributed to the new value that she places on life, which in advance the near-death experience was much lower. Most likely, she will exercise caution pass on in the future.A nother aspect that the persona takes away from this experience is her cite of the living qualities of nature. Oliver explains this with the passage directly after the description of the rebirth The water, that mobilize of shattered glass/healed itself with a slow whisper/and perplex back/with the back-lit light of polished steel/and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees/ agitate open the snowy pleats of their wings, and drifted away.The persona now sees living value of nature, and how it is not merely inanimate objects, but a being just like us. Before the near-death experience, the persona of the poem was blind to this truism. Unfortunately, it took a bout with death to expose these facts, but it is equally important that she now understands this.This newfound value is already evident in the personas life. Oliver makes sure to show the personas transformation in concrete details I reached out/I picked the wild flowers from the grass around me/blue stars/and crim son trumpets/on long green stems/for hours in my trembling custody they glittered/like fire. The persona picks the flowers and realizes their living qualities, hence the simile to fire in the last line of the poem.The poem contains many literary devices that Oliver uses to convey her subject matter in the poem. The entire poem is a conceit, or extended metaphor, for a rebirthing process. Oliver gives us the blindness in the beginning of the poem when the persona unwisely walks up to the riverbank without any regard for the habitat of the animals that live in and around the river (e.g. the alligator), and the possible perils of an alligator encounter (e.g. death). Next was the near-death experience, as the alligator crossed paths with the persona, which caused the transformation. Finally, the rebirth occurs, and the changes in her life are occurring as soon as the rebirth happens.Clearly, Mary Oliver illustrates the rebirthing process in her poem Alligator Poem. She beautifully d emonstrates this process with personification, conceit, and metaphors. She is a great poet, and Alligator Poem is a great example of her tremendous body of work.Works CitedOliver, Mary. Alligator Poem. 50 Great Poems and Short Stories. Random House, 1990.