In line 18 Oliver states the obvious, that she is “curious” as to what lies deeper inside of her. She has come to face the fact that she does not know who she truly is, but she is eager to find out. She finds her answer on her morning walks along to shore. In line 21 Oliver broaches to whelks once again. She calls them “perfect and shining,” but she goes on to describe how they are eroded by the tide and the rubbing against the land. In fact, it is the whelks’ imperfections that make them perfect. They have “rubbed so long against the world” (22), and their experience of life has cracked them. “They have almost vanished,/ with the last relinquishing/ of their unrepeatable energy.” (24-26) These three lines are among the most important in the poem. Oliver is drawing a parallel between herself and the whelks because this is how she is to go about finding what lies deep within her soul. The only way to know what is inside of a whelk is for is to be cracked open. Whelks accomplish this themselves by being “rubbed so long against the world.” Oliver has to experience the world and live life in order to respond to it, and in turn respond to herself. It is not until Oliver knows her feelings about her experiences that she can be introduced to what lies beneath the “gloss.”
In line 28 Oliver realizes that her link is the whelk. She speaks of how she picks it up and holds it every time she sees one. Occasionally she has a moment in which she truly understands what she wants out of life like in lines 31-36. She understands that in order to attain what she is in search of, she has to be willing to experience nature on a personal level and “be wild in the darkness.” It is then that she will resemble the whelks in all of her imperfect perfection.
Structurally, the poem is not unusual. It consists of one stanza containing only five sentences. The line breaks do not necessarily follow punctuation; sometimes they appear mid-sentence. The diction is typical of Oliver’s style; that is relatively simple. One of the main structural techniques that is vital to the success of this poem (success meaning the exposure of the message) is the role of the narrator. Oliver has used her own experience and her own voice to portray a common theme. That theme is the discovery of self. If Oliver had chosen a different narrator or no narrator at all, the point of the poem may have been lost. Without Oliver’s voice, the connection between her and the whelks would not exist and the poem would merely be a wonderful picture of an Oceanside stroll, perhaps not even that.
In her reflection in Orion magazine, Oliver speaks of being a stranger to herself in her younger years. Her interests were to study herself as William Wordsworth did. Whelks is a good example of how Oliver intends to study herself. Since she was a little girl, Oliver has connected with nature. Now she is using nature as a means of discovering herself. Her understanding of nature will help her draw parallels to herself as she has accomplished in this particular poem. Oliver’s poetry is a process by which she is attempting to put her own experiences to paper and thus understanding them on a greater level. According to Whelks the only way to discover oneself is to understand one’s experiences.
