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by
Mary Oliver
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January 11 - January 11, 2025
Everything in this book is true, in the autobiographical sense of the word. That is, I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memory. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.
I have felt all my life that I was wise, and tasteful too, to speak very little about myself—to deflect the curiosity in the personal self that descends upon writers, especially in this country and at this time, from both casual and avid readers. My feelings have changed, to some degree anyway.
Therefore I find a compelling reason to write something revealing, a little, my private and natural self—to offer something that must in the future be taken into consideration by any who would claim to know me. I am only too aware of the ways in which inclination and supposition will fill whatever spaces in this world, or a life, are left vacant. And so I say again: I myself am the author of this document; it has no other formal persona, as my books of poems certainly do.
Neither are these writings of event or of periods of time exactly, but created out of mood, of reaction to various happenings in the world, and of my own searchings and findings in, if you will allow it, the fields of the spirit. Not that the flesh here does not also sing in its human house; there is that too.
Consider what is written rather as parts of a conversation, or a long and slowly arriving letter—somewhat disorderly, natural in expression, and happily unfinished.
I KNOW A YOUNG MAN who can build almost anything—a boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house. And so serenely, and in so assured and right a manner, that it is joy to watch him. All the same, what he seems to care for best—what he seems positively to desire—is the hour of interruption, of hammerless quiet, in which he will sit and write down poems or stories that have come into his mind with clambering and colorful force.
In building things, he is his familiar self, which he does not overvalue. But in the act of writing he is a grander man, a surprise to us, and even more to himself. He is beyond what he believed himself to be.
Once, in fact, I built a house. It was a minuscule house, a one-room, one-floored affair set in the ivies and vincas of the backyard, and made almost entirely of salvaged materials. Still, it had a door. And four windows. And, miraculously, a peaked roof, so I could stand easily inside, and walk around.
The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion.
It shakes away an excess of seriousness. Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all day long.
I was involved, frustrated, devoted, resolved, nicked and scraped, and delighted. The work went slowly. The roof went on, was shingled with red cedar. I was a poet, but I was away for a while from the loom of thought and formal language; I was playing. I was whimsical, absorbed, happy. Let me always be who I am, and then some.
I don’t think I am old yet, or done with growing. But my perspective has altered—I am less hungry for the busyness of the body, more interested in the tricks of the mind.
You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.
their sense of “inherited responsibility”—to do, of course, with received wealth and a sense of using it for public good.
For it is precisely how I feel, who have inherited not measurable wealth but, as we all do who care for it, that immeasurable fund of thoughts and ideas, from writers and thinkers long gone into the ground—and, inseparable from those wisdoms because demanded by them, the responsibility to live thoughtfully and intelligently. To enjoy, to question—never to assume, or trample. Thus the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me—to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always care-ingly.
Who are they? For me they are Shelley, and Fabre, and Wordsworth—the young Wordsworth—and Barbara Ward, and Blake, and Basho, Maeterlinck and Jastrow, and sweetest Emerson, and Carson, and Aldo Leopold. Forebears, models, spirits whose influence and teachings I am now inseparable from, and forever grateful for. I go nowhere, I arrive nowhere, without them. With them I live my life, with them I enter the event, I mold the meditation, I keep if I can some essence of the hour, even as it slips away. And I do not accomplish this alert and loving confrontation by myself and alone, but through
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They were dreamers, and imaginers, and declarers; they lived looking and looking and looking, seeing the apparent and beyond the apparent, wondering, allowing for uncertainty, also grace, easygoing here, ferociously unmovable there; they were thoughtful. A few voices, strict and punctilious, like Shelley’s, like Thoreau’s, cry out: Change! Change! But most don’t say that; they simply say: Be what you are, of the earth, but a dreamer too. Teilhard de Chardin was not talking about how to escape anguish, but about how to live with it.
All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.
YEARS AGO I set three “rules” for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose.
I want every poem to “rest” in intensity. I want it to be rich with “pictures of the world.” I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world. I want each poem to indicate a life lived with intelligence, patience, passion, and whimsy (not my life—not necessarily!—but the life of my formal self, the writer).
I want the poem to ask something and, at its best moments, I want the question to remain unanswered. I want it to be clear that answering the question is the reader’s part in an implicit author-reader pact. Last but not least, I want the poem to have a pulse, a breathiness, some moment of earthly delight. (While one is luring the reader into the enclosure of serious subjects, pleasure is by no means an unimportant ingredient.)
All narrative is metaphor.
When I see the black cricket in the woodpile, in autumn, I don’t frighten her. And when I see the moss grazing upon the rock, I touch her tenderly, sweet cousin.
It is a simple case. The eye that does not look back does not acknowledge. To Poe’s narrator, it is unbearable.
literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true, part of the composite human record—that is, not words but a reality.
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
IN THE LYRICAL POEMS of Robert Frost there is almost always something wrong, a dissatisfaction or distress. The poet attempts an explanation and a correction. He is not successful. But he has, often in metaphoric language, named whatever it is that disquiets him. At the same time, in the same passages, the poem is so pleasant—so very pleasant—to read or to hear. In fact we are hearing two different messages: everything is all right, say the meter and the rhyme; everything is not all right, say the words. This makes of the poem a complex discourse, although it is not felt to be so by the
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It is as though Frost felt himself obliged, as a public man, to display a reasonable cheerfulness, whatever he felt privately.
A hundred times Frost’s misery, absolutely his misery, catches up some merry sparkle. A hundred times he sinks, and yet again opens his eyes to the stars. Yes, one must embrace the darkness with the light to get all of Frost’s gift.
There is a madness born of too much light, and Whitman was not after madness nor even recklessness, but the tranquility of affinity and function. He was after a joyfulness, a belief in existence in which man’s inner light is neither rare nor elite, but godly and common, and acknowledged. For that it was necessary to be rooted, again, in the world.
One day as I wrestled with that long opening poem, the complaint burst from me: With Whitman it’s opera, opera, opera all the time! I shouted, in something very like weariness.
They are not stories; they are glances, possibilities. They are any of us, almost, in another life, and they expect of the reader a costly exchange; we cannot glide here upon narrative but must imaginatively take on other destinies:
A great loneliness was Whitman’s constant companion, his prod, his necessary Other. One sees it everywhere in his personal life, his professional life, his beautifying portrayals of young men, his intense and prolonged references to the body’s joy. It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty. Thus Whitman: grown man, lonely man.
The fetch of his breath and the fetch of his ambition began on the shores of this loneliness. Without it he might have relaxed back from the endless and fiery work. He might have let a little moderation into his rhapsody. Certainly he would not have been the Whitman we mean when we say: the poet, Whitman.
The erotic and the mystical are no strangers: each is a tempest; each drowns the individual in the yearn and success of combination; each calls us forth from an ordinary life to a new measure. For Whitman the erotic life of the body was all that the word “erotic” means, plus more; it was also its own music, its authority, and its manner of glazing our surroundings so that it seems we have been given new sight.
Whitman, advocating the affirmative life of the body—I want to say the luster of the body—was at the same time in an alliance with the power of transformation. Was Whitman a mystic? For myself, I cannot answer the question except to say that surely he was a religious poet in the same sense that Emerson was a religious man, for whom life itself was light. For Emerson, it was light as clear as spring in his own orchard. For Whitman, it was that hot burning, that heaviness of intent, that vertigo, that trembling: that merge. Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of
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the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less. We study it as literature, but like all great literature it has a deeper design: it would be a book for men to live by. It is obsessively affirmative. It is foolishly, childishly, obsessively affirmative. It offers a way to live, in the religious sense, that is intelligent and emotive and rich, and, dependent only on the individual—no politics, no liturgy, no down payment. Just: attention, sympathy, empathy. Neither does Whitman speak of hell or damnation; rather, he is parental and
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In order to be the person I want to be, I must strive, hourly, against the drag of the others.
I can think for a little while; then, it’s the world again.
IN THE WINTER I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of———. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a
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Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us.
In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive. Insofar as one can, I put aside ego and vanity, and even intention. I listen. What I hear is almost a voice, almost a language. It is a second ocean, rising, singing into one’s ear, or deep inside the ears, whispering in the recesses where one is less oneself than a part of some single indivisible community. Blake spoke of taking dictation. I am no Blake, yet I know the nature of what he meant. Every poet knows it. One learns the craft, and then casts off. One hopes for gifts. One hopes for direction. It is both physical, and
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What are divisions for, if you look into it, but to lay out a stratification—that is, to suggest where an appreciative or not so appreciative response is proper, to each of the many parts of our indivisible world?
living like this is for me the difference between a luminous life and a ho-hum life. So be it! With my whole heart, I live as I live. My affinity is to the whimsical, the illustrative, the suggestive—not to the factual or the useful. I walk, and I notice. I am sensual in order to be spiritual. I look into everything without cutting into anything. And then I come home and M. says—she always says it!— How was it? The answer has never varied or been less than spontaneous: It was wonderful.
Privacy, no longer cherished in the world, is all the same still a natural and sensible attribute of paradise. We are happy, and we are lucky. We are neither political nor inclined to likecompany. Repeat: we are happy, and we are lucky. We make for each other: companionship, intimacy, affection, rhapsody. Whenever I hear of something horrible, I want to cover M.’s ears. Whenever I see something beautiful, and my heart is shouting, it is M. I run to, to tell about it.
When I write about nature directly, or refer to it, here are some things I don’t mean, and a few I do. I don’t mean nature as ornamental, however scalloped and glowing it may be. I don’t mean nature as useful to man if that possibility of utility takes from an object its own inherent value. Or, even, diminishes it. I don’t mean nature as calamity, as vista, as vacation or recreation. I don’t mean landscapes in which we find rest and pleasure—although we do—so much as I mean landscapes in which we are reinforced in our sense of the world as a mystery, a mystery that entails other privileges
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And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready? Would you not cleanse your study of all that is cheap, or trivial? Would you not live in continual hope, and pleasure, and excitement? Now the green ocean begins to take on the hue and cry of its sheets of spring blue. Weary and sleepy, winter slowly polishes the moon through the long nights, then recedes to the north, its body thinning and melting, like a bundle of old riddles left, one more year, unanswered. Acknowledgments I thank the editors of the following magazines and
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