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Literature Annotations

Oliver, Mary
University Hospital, Boston
Genre Poem
KeywordsCaregivers, Death and Dying, Disease and Health, Doctor-Patient Relationship, Hospitalization, Suffering, Technology, Trauma, War and Medicine
SummaryThe narrator is visiting a sick loved one in University Hospital, Boston and reflects on the many patients who have stayed in this hospital, most especially the young men from the battlefields of the American Civil War.
CommentaryThis elegiac poem in blank verse is a love poem to both the medical profession and the poet's loved one who seems to be getting better. One gets the distinct impression, however, that both the poet and the patient, whose professed improvement is relayed to us though the poet, are protesting too much. Each stanza (of four) deftly intertwines the subjects of love, medical care, history and the health of living things. In this poem, which is more sophisticated than a first reading or even a second might indicate, the poet conflates the health of the human patients in University Hospital, Boston, with the leit motif of the well-being of the natural world as exemplified by trees in particular.
SourceNew and Selected Poems
PublisherBeacon
Edition1992
Place PublishedBoston
Alternate SourceOn Doctoring
Alternate PublisherSimon & Schuster
Alternate Edition2001 (3rd ed.)
Alternate EditorsRichard Reynolds, John Stone, Lois LaCivita Nixon, & Delese Wear
Place PublishedNew York
MiscellaneousThe collection in which this poem appears won the National Book Award for Poetry.
Annotated by Ratzan, Richard M.
Date of Entry 06/14/96
Last Revised 08/22/01