Towards the end of last semester, I stumbled across a poem that I absolutely fell in love with. Considering that we are beginning the month of February, I felt like sharing a piece of work with a promise of hope and rebirth.“Wild Geese” was written by poet Mary Oliver and published in 1986 in her collection, “Dream Work.”
Born on September 10, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio, Mary Oliver grew to be a prolific poet and held numerous awards until her death in 2019. Her schooling took place at two universities, Ohio State and Vassar College, but she left both without receiving a degree. She was deeply influenced by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home whilst helping Millay’s sister organize paperwork. It was during this period of time that she met her lifelong partner, Molly Malone Cook, and after a short while, the couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts. The East Coast landscape was an inspiration for her writings and she began to mark her place in the world of poetry through the aspects of nature and humanity’s relationship to it. Her fifth book “American Primitive”(1983), won the Pulitzer Prize and she followed it with her collection “Dream Work”in which Oliver “moves from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’. . . into the world of historical and personal suffering” (Ostriker). In 1992, she published a collection entitled “New and Selected Poems” which won the National Book Award. Oliver continued to write her poetry until her death in 2019. Critics have compared Oliver to other esteemed poets such as Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman. Her favorite theme to broach in her work was the intersection between the human and natural world and how we respond to it.
While her poem “Wild Geese” does in fact speak to the natural world, I found its meaning to be a tad more personal. I’ve found myself in a space of reflection and self-awareness recently, wondering how I measure up to the people around me in all aspects:academic, social, and even personal. I recently had a conversation with a friend and vented to her about some of the thoughts I’d been struggling with and she essentially responded by saying that I am a complicated and multi-faceted person and that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don’t have to be just one thing. One personality trait, a singular vibe. I am a plethora of art and words, thoughts and feelings, spoken and unspoken. I am the very definition of human, and to me, this is what “Wild Geese” expresses. The poem begins with the sentences, “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting” (Oliver 1-3). The way in which the speaker of the poem begins is a relieving feeling of reassurance that it’s okay to be human and one should not apologize for being so. The speaker goes on to describe the ways in which life still continues and that when the reader surfaces from the gloom of melancholy and sadness, there is a place for them: the world “. . . calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things” (Oliver 16-18). In a way, the speaker is expressing that the natural world understands and has sympathy for one’s experiences as a human being and yet, it continues. Thus, one can rejoin the throes of life whenever they’re ready to.
Ever since discovering this piece, I always come back to it whenever I’m in need of a source of comfort and reassurance. It’s almost as if the words are being spoken with the intention of feeding the reader its strength and sense of calm. I hope this poem can find its way to more people and impart the same warmth I’ve received from it.
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