The Summer Day by Mary Oliver (1990)

I wasn’t much into nature poems when I was a youthful hooligan, but Mary Oliver ushered me into them, and I have no plans to leave now. What I love about this poem is how it moves through grand, spiritual, existential spaces and ties them to a tiny moment with a grasshopper. And then at the end, she’s all BAM! This stuff is important!

The language is deceptively simple here. When I was dabbling in pretension, I used to think of ‘accessibility’ as a slight against art. Now I see that, in many ways, making art accessible is more challenging than making it erudite. And this piece in particular is nothing if not accessible, as evidenced by its almost single-handed sustainment of the Etsy economy. No matter. There is nothing trite about universal love.

Short Stuff:

• Mary Oliver passed away only a few months after I got my tattoo, which is a direct homage to this poem. I feared I had some crazy psychic powers and made a vow that I would only use them for good.
• She has a book called Dog Songs that’s all about how awesome dogs are.
• Oliver won the Pulitzer in 1984, and she has four more honorary doctorate degrees than I do. (She has four.)

Topics in this poem:

agnosticism; transcendentalism (I think so, at least); living your best life

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You turds aren’t clicking on the links, so I’m just going to post the whole poems instead of excerpts:

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 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?

—Mary Oliver