Featured Photo: Pondering Woman | © Pixabay
MaryOliver is a poet who preferred to let her work speak for herself rather than take a stance in interviews. She studied at Ohio State University, among others, without ever graduating herself.
Nonetheless, Ohio is an important part of the inspiration for her poetry, and it never ceases to amaze me how home-loving people come out Ohio are, even if they spend most of their lives somewhere else.
MaryOliver was from Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau inspired and received the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. She died in Florida in 2019 from complications from cancer.
I became interested in her when I first read her poem "The Summer Day" and I couldn't get the last sentence of the poem out of my mind: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung himself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel 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?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
"It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of a day."
Henry David Thoreau Life Without Principle (1863)
