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 Eng-197-7 land 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 temporarily.
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