One of the defining features of Mary Oliver’s poetry is the way she always maintains a sense of mystery. She points to the existence of over-arching meaning as if it is a part of some inside secret between her and the reader – never really saying what it is, as if she’s winking at you.
As a result I always finish reading her poems with a feeling of amazement at the mystery – and that’s exactly her intention. In her interview with On Being’s Krista Tippett, she describes how attempting to define spiritual meaning is “always insufficient, but the question and the wonder is not unsatisfying…It’s an endless, unanswerable quest. I find it endlessly fascinating.”
Without providing answers, she does occasionally offer advice. The most notable – the underpinning of almost all of her poetry – is constant, empathetic attention to nature. Wild Geese, one of her most beloved works, is centered on just that: Oliver’s compassionate attentiveness to the natural life around her.
She originally wrote Wild Geese as an exercise to demonstrate the impact of end-stopped lines --- and as a reader, the technique works wonders, forcing you to stop and process the significance of each line. The best example from this poem is --- “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on.” These lines always remind me of the final film scene of Call Me By Your Name, when Elio stares at the fire bearing all of the pain he's experiencing while the household continues undistracted behind him.
Through Wild Geese, Oliver coaxes our innate sense of displacement and pursuit of purpose. As we fret about our search for belonging and meaning and the many other things that keep us up at night, she points to how nature continues unfettered in its flow. The repetition of the word “meanwhile” throughout the poem acts as such a reassurance – that no matter our disturbances, the natural cycle of the world goes on.
She urges the reader to look to nature and the way fellow beings (like the wild geese) are so sure of their place in the world. We, too, she says are “called” by nature, which “over and over announces our place in the family of things.” I always love the way she writes about our relationship to nature as an obedience of sorts --- as if asking the reader to submit to the mystery. Right from the first line she tells --- “You don’t have to be good”, ultimately concluding: 'you just have to be'.
What I get most from this poem is true comfort, and after all, that's just a nice feeling to have.
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Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
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.
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