Putting Rivers and Birds into Poems

Mary Oliver opens her poem, “Singapore,” with a stark visual of something we’ve all seen before, but which remains unfamiliar to most: an airport worker cleaning in the bathroom. The “darkness ripped from my eyes” to see “the light that can shine out of a life” at the beginning and end of the poem symbolizes the blindness of not seeing the worker as a person in the speaker’s view as reality forces her to reexamine the person in front of her. The woman doing her job is first associated with the dirty connotations of both the ash tray she is trying to clean and the toilet bowl in which she is washing it. Both things we commonly group under a negative tone of being poor, dirty, and to be avoided. Then the speaker seems to force positive thoughts into her head, mimicked by the almost side-note mention of the poem within the poem. The speaker must refocus her eyes to see a lighter picture and the mention of needing birds and rivers foreshadowing her simile of scrubbing the metal with a blue cloth like a river and comparing her dark hair to the wing of a bird, implying that like a bird’s wing at rest, her beauty is waiting to be set free. The tone becomes lighter and lighter, speaking of beauty, birds, rivers, allowing the speaker to indulge in our common American happy-ending thoughts of rising up beyond her dirty life and “fly down to the river,” as if to wash away the past and travel somewhere better. Finally, in the last stanza, the two tones coincide to form the tone of appreciating the beauty in the reality, “the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,” emphasized by repeating the phrase “the way” uncapitalized at the beginning of the last lines describing a person’s need to see the light in darkness.