Small puzzle. You might try this on one of your poetry-reading chums.
What famous poet lived in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house known as Steepletop just outside West Stockbridge in Austerlitz, New York? The answer is pretty obvious. But let me add one word. What other famous poet lived in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house? Perhaps it will help if I give you one of her remarkable poems. It’s called “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.
* * *
The poet is Mary Oliver who died four years ago and who, along with Billy Collins, became America’s best-selling living poet.
* * *
Oliver was born in a suburb of Cleveland and raised in a dysfunctional family with an abusive father. She took refuge in poetry and in connecting to the great outdoors where she initiated a friendship with nature that drew ever closer throughout her life.
Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,
the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds –
each one a new life!
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.
* * *
The day after graduating from high school, Mary Oliver abruptly left home and drove to Steepletop, where Millay had lived until her death in 1950. Oliver stayed there for some seven years helping Millay’s sister organize the poet’s papers. Millay’s lingering spirit must have been inspirational to the teenager, because in her subsequent career Oliver published fifteen volumes of verse and won the Pulitzer Prize among many other honors.
* * *
The older poet would surely have been impressed with this poem of Oliver’s, so moving and persuasive; and you may recognize its famous last lines.
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 herself 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 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?
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?
* * *
After meeting and discovering a lifetime partner who was visiting Steepletop, Oliver moved to Provincetown, Cape Cod, and lived along the ocean the rest of her life.
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do And the sea says
In its lovely voice:
excuse me, I have work to do.
* * *
Now a little shift of gears.
One way for a poet to win the heart and mind of gnarled old columnists is to write warmly and wonderfully about dogs, And Mary Oliver is the dog poet par excellence. Her volume of verse called “Dog Songs” introduces us to a number of her dogs, including Benjamin, Ricky and Luke. But Percy is my favorite, and you’ll enjoy meeting him in three of her Percy Poems.
PERCY
Our new dog, named for the beloved poet,
ate a book which unfortunately we had
left unguarded.
Fortunately it was the Bhagavad Gita,
of which many copies are available.
Every day now, as Percy grows
Into the beauty of his life, we touch
his wild, curly head and say,
“Oh, wisest of little dogs.”
* * *
THE SWEETNESS OF DOGS
What do you say, Percy? I am thinking
of sitting out on the sand to watch
the moon rise. It’s full tonight.
So we go
and the moon rises, so beautiful it
makes me shudder, makes me think about
time and space, makes me take
measure of myself: one iota
pondering heaven. Thus we sit, myself
thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s
perfect beauty and also, oh! how rich
it is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile,
leans against me and gazes up
into my face. As though I were just as wonderful
as the perfect moon.
PERCY SPEAKS WHILE I AM DOING TAXES
First of all, I do not want to be doing this.
Second of all, Percy does not want me
to be doing this.
bent over the desk like a besieged person
with a dull pencil and innumerable lists
of numbers.
Outside the water is blue, the sky is clear,
the tide rising.
Percy, I say, this has to be done. This is
essential. I’ll be finished eventually.
“Keep me in your thoughts,” he replies. “Just because
I can’t count to ten doesn’t mean
I don’t remember yesterday, or anticipate today.
I’ll give you ten more minutes,” and he does.
Then shouts—who could resist—his
favorite words: Let’s go!
* * *
Mary Oliver’s writings on life and love of nature have had a significant impact, especially on young readers just shaping their lives as she did. Her advice to them: “You must never stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
And for herself?
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.
* * *
VIDEO. Many of Mary Oliver’s poems are deeply personal. But when she gave public readings, the audiences always looked forward to her Percy Poems. So here, from a performance at the 92nd Street Y in New York, is Mary Oliver performing two Percy poems plus a lovely verse about the seashore. The first Percy piece is a derivation from a famous poem by the English writer Christopher Smart (1722-1771).
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: MARY OLIVER
