Mary Oliver: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement.”
Today we feature beloved poet Mary Oliver, who was "saved by poetry"
By Emily Brooke Felt
We are delighted to welcome another guest writer to Poetry Buds, Emily Brooke Felt. Emily is a writer who is also a mother, caregiver, traveller, and lover of poetry. She started her newsletter Joy on the Journey so that she would remember to dwell on what’s good in the world. (She believes that there’s a lot of it, if we only pay attention.)
A surprising number of people say that poetry has healing properties.
Poetry has been used as a therapeutic intervention in social work, palliative care, trauma recovery, and other settings; at the top of the list of therapeutic poets, often, is Mary Oliver.
Oliver, an American poet who passed away in 2019, is known for her direct, lyrical style that concerns themes of nature, attention and the human experience.
In an interview with Krista Tippett in the On Being podcast, Oliver described being “saved by poetry.” Likewise, many of her readers say her poetry changed their lives.
A New Yorker contributor noted that Oliver’s death brought “an outpouring of messages from readers saying that they didn’t know how to love, or even like poetry, until they found her work.” 1 One writer, a cancer survivor writing in The New York Times, said: “It is no exaggeration to say that Mary Oliver gave me the blueprint, the roadmap, for the rest of my life.” She was referencing the final stanzas of the poem “When Death Comes.” 2
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Read the full poem.
In my studies in theopoetics and writing, a field which explores the intersection of spirituality, aesthetics and the arts, I recalled the first time I was moved by Mary Oliver. I was living abroad, full of loneliness, and the anxiety of being new to motherhood. My son—then just a baby—was sleeping, and I was standing in the hallway at my mother-in-law’s house, a basket of laundry propped up against my hip. My phone buzzed—a fellow expat friend had texted me Mary Oliver’s short poem “Wild Geese,” which begins:
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.
Listen to Oliver read the full poem.
This was 16 years ago. I wasn’t an avid reader of poetry at the time, but reading these lines I felt a stab of softness go through my body, and I teared up. I still remember it vividly.
Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Ohio and spent much of her childhood outdoors and with books. She began writing poetry as a teenager; she studied at college but did not graduate. As a young poet she worked, organizing the papers of Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Oliver is the author of collections of both poetry collections and prose. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 for American Primitive and the National Book Award in 1992 for New and Selected Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships and has taught at different institutions. She is often referred to as a place-based poet, because of her focus on the “quiet of occurrences of nature.” 3
People celebrate the accessibility of Oliver’s poetry; though some criticize it. Reading her, we quickly feel at home in our own skin. This is very different from what many of us felt in our junior high poetry classes—where we struggled to grasp an elusive meaning, buried amidst an obscure barrage of words. As one author says, her poems “do not need critics; they try very hard to attain the directness of sunlight, the refreshing qualities of spring water and fresh bread, to be good for you without needing you to seed them, peel them, dice them or process them further first.”
In my theopoetics class we read selected poems from Devotions, a collection of her best work. Some students gushed, citing the delight and transcendence it brought up in them. Others felt her work to be too easily accessible and resisted its mass popularization. A few lamented that she hadn’t actively claimed her place among LBGTQ+ poets. Shouldn’t poetry address more than trees and flowers and animals, they asked?
Oliver must have tussled with the same question. While reading Devotions, I discovered “Singapore,” a poem in which Oliver explores the issue of what a poem should be, whether it need be filled with trees and birds.
The setting—the Singapore airport. The scene—a glance exchanged between a poet traveller and a cleaning woman in the airport bathroom.
I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life. And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop and fly down to the river. This probably won’t happen. But maybe it will.
She continues:
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life. I mean the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth, The way her smile was only for my sake: I mean the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.
Read the full poem.
I wrote about “Singapore” in my final paper as an example of the poesis of the everyday, how looking deeply into any moment can yield the sense of connectedness and belonging that we long for.
Nor was Oliver a stranger to hardship and pain. In her interview with Krista Tippett she described her childhood of abuse, saying “It was a very bad childhood—and I escaped it, barely, with years of trouble. But I did find the entire world, in looking for something [...] and I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
Struggle and awe intermingle at the heart of “The Journey”…
You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
…and the natural world seems to dance between resolution and despair:
But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own
Mary Oliver was known to spend hours alone in contemplation in nature around her home in Provincetown. “Somebody once wrote about me and said I must have a private grant or something; that all I seem to do is walk around the woods and write poems. But I was very, very poor, and I ate a lot of fish, ate a lot of clams,” she said in her On Being interview.
She was also a serious student of the creative process. Her essay collections and prose, such as The Poetry Handbook, are astute insightful guides to the craft. In the essay “Of Power and Time,” she describes how a poet (or any artist) lives and works from a different self than other folks, often ignoring daily life and the people in it. “The poem gets written,” she says. “I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.”
“The Summer Day” is one of Oliver’s most famous poems. Its line “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” has reverberated around the internet via the self-help and personal development movements. Taken alone, it seems to energize the inner quest for doing something important with life.
But a close reading of the prior lines of the poem suggests the opposite, as the poet observes a grasshopper:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day. / Tell me, what else should I have done?
Read the full poem.
In my theopoetics class, the professor shared an anecdote from one of Oliver’s public poetry readings. The Summer Day was inspired when Oliver attended a birthday party for some neighbors in Provincetown as she contemplated a grasshopper trying to eat a crumb from a piece of birthday cake. In early drafts she had the party's description in the poem, but she couldn't make it work poetically so she cut and cut and cut and now the grasshopper is the guest of honor.
I found this to be a delightful piece of the story, and wondered about other such invisible inputs into Oliver’s poetry, where she frequently juxtaposes human concerns with the “work” of nature simply being itself.
And, after all, what can we possibly do better than be ourselves—just like geese or grasshoppers—at home in the world?
More, please
Mary Oliver’s website
Mary Oliver giving a Poetry Reading in 2012 at the 92nd Street Y:
Mary Oliver’s interview on the On Being podcast. Also available on Apple podcasts:
Mary Oliver reads Wild Geese here or here:
A great piece on Mary Oliver’s essay “Of Power and Time” by Maria Popova of The Marginalian.
Thank you, Emily! Please follow Emily’s newsletter Joy on the Journey on Substack.
How about you? Do you have a favorite Mary Oliver poem? Or do you have a Mary Oliver “experience” in your life?
See you tomorrow with another poet!
Emily, what a gorgeous profile of Mary Oliver. Like many, I adore her, and I learned many new things here, including reading the poem "Singapore" for the first time. Thank you for this lovely exploration of such a beloved poet!
You unpack Mary Oliver's work so elegantly, with a ton of backing references. Well done!