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    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons"
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons"
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons"
    Ebook27 pages18 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535829083
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "Music Lessons" - Gale

      1

      Music Lessons

      Mary Oliver

      1979

      Introduction

      Mary Oliver is usually and conveniently referred to as a New England nature or pastoral poet and thought to descend from a line of other New England pastoralist writers, from Thoreau to Robert Frost. Music Lessons, from Oliver’s third volume of poetry, Twelve Moons (1979), however, is somewhat uncharacteristic since its inspiration and situation begin in a house at a private music lesson where a teacher takes a break from teaching and plays for her probably younger student and for herself. Perhaps the poem documents a memory from Oliver’s childhood.

      In Music Lessons a teacher, perhaps growing tired with the student’s fumblings or imperfections, decides to take over the keyboard. The music acts upon the student as challenge and adventure and upon the pianist as escape from domesticity and mortality. Quietly feminist and more loudly a paean to music, the title, Music Lessons, is apropos in that the paean was, in its earliest known instance in The Iliad of Homer, a song praising and calling for Apollo, the Paian, or healer. Apollo is the ancient Greek god of arts and civilization, and specifically, patron of music (whose instrument is the lyre which is also the name of the frame holding the strings of the piano). Music, Apollonian or otherwise, may not serve as healer of life’s ills, but it does depict an act that seems to defy the duties of life and the inevitability of death—at least

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