A reader tweeted that she has a copy of”Wild Geese” on her desk.
Mary Oliver,”Wild Geese”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
This
To a Young Poet, Brooke Belk, Jan 18, 2019
I dreamed last night
Of her unwritten poems
Lined up in the Bardo
Waiting for you to say them.
Mary Oliver is one of those poets whom sophisticates disdain. And it’s not just that they are envious of her popularity in a time when few read poetry or critics, though they transparently are. Her unforgivable sin, some seem to think, is that she wrote nature poetry, in simple language, and equated the outer world of seashore and swamp with her emotional world. Trite, they often implied or said outright, and too easy, this indulgence of pathetic fallacy. And some even accused her of an uncritical acceptance of a narrowing, distorting, limiting Romantic male identification of women and nature.
The first of these critiques was often leveled at Robert Frost until Randall Jarrell took the smarmy critics to the woodshed and taught them to look more deeply. Oliver too bears reading more deeply. She was extraordinarily honest and was quite capable of casting a cold eye on this or that in the natural world and in herself. And her affair with nature is not of that simple-minded sort. She just didn’t buy the glib bifurcation of the world and the spirit that those critics have inherited, unexamined, from Plato and the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Indigenous peoples and new lovers and Mary Oliver knew better than to accept that. It is they, not she, who have failed to think carefully and anew.
And, of course, Oliver had the good sense to understand that we and the damselflies are in this together.
There is more there, in her work, than meets the eye. You have to be as observant as she was to see this.
Loved the poem, and read every illuminating word of Bob’s review too. Reading the poem, I kept thinking of the captivating vernacular lyrics of country singer Iris Dement, wondering if anyone knows her too.
Thanks for the heads up, Ira. I wasn’t familiar with her music, though I have long loved her singing partner, John Prine. She’s wonderful!
1) Which best represents the underlying message
conveyed by the author in lines 6 to 11?
a) Weather can affect one’s emotional response to a situation
b) Landscapes are not only physical but can inspire emotions
c) Sharing your feelings with others can improve your mood
d) Feelings of loneliness, when shared, can free you from pain
e) This ELA test utterly distorts the meaning of poetry and prose.
Exactly!!!! Thank you!!!!
Thank you.
Thanks for this
Got this post the morning we are going out on the Tennessee River looking for birds. Perfect. I thought I was the only one that wrote poems addressed to birds. RIP Mary Oliver.
Please share some of them, Roy! Or point us to where we can find them online.