Mary Oliver: A Pocketful of Thoughts

Prayer and Faith in the Life and Poetry of Mary Oliver

I Happened to be Standing

by Mary Oliver

I don’t know where prayers go,

            or what they do.

Do cats pray, while they sleep

            half-asleep in the sun?

Does the opossum pray as it

            crosses the street?

The sunflowers? The old black oak

            growing older every year?

I know I can walk through the world,

            along the shore or under the trees,

with my mind filled with things

            of little importance, in full

self-attendance. A condition I can’t really

            call being alive.

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,

            or does it really matter?

The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.

Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing

just outside my door, with my notebook open,

which is the way I begin every morning.

Then a wren in the privet began to sing.

He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,

I don’t know why. And yet, why not.

I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe

or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. 

But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be

if it isn’t prayer?

So I just listened, my pen in the air.

from: A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press, NY, 2012, p. 3-4

Quoting 19th century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, in her Poetry Handbook (1994) Mary Oliver describes poetry as ‘a confession of faith.’  For her, ‘poetry requires a vision, a faith,’ but it is not

…an exercise, it is not wordplay…..it contains something beyond language devices and has a purpose other than itself. And it is a part of the sensibility of the writer. I don’t mean in any confessional way but that it reflects from the writer’s point of view.

And years later in an interview with American journalist Krista Tippett (2015), Oliver commented: ‘(I) have no answers, but have some suggestions. I know that a life is much richer with a spiritual part to it. And I also think that nothing is more interesting, so I cling to it. And I read about it.’

Mary Oliver never held what we would think of an institutional understanding of faith or a developed theology, even though later in life she became close to Tom Shaw who was a monk and an Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts. For her, religion is very helpful in people thinking that they themselves are not sufficient, that there is (she said) ‘something other that has to do with all of us and is more than any of us.' But for her, doctrines of a church or a catechism of teaching, won’t cut it: ‘Let me keep my distance, always, from those / who think they have the answers...' Mysteries, Yes, (from Evidence, 2009).

Poetry then works in a relationship with something other or more than we are. It is spiritual, but not necessarily aligning with any church teaching; it is authentic, but not self-indulgent. Where did this understanding of poetry for her come from?

I want to offer here some signposts in this direction; ones that have occurred to me in my reading of Mary Oliver's poetry which may be enjoyable or helpful for you. These impressions are based on my reading her work, and also listening to those few precious interviews she gave in the last ten years of her life.

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. When she was young and at Sunday School, she remembered having trouble with belief in the Resurrection of Jesus. Although she stopped going to church, she admitted years later that she was still ‘probably more interested than many of the kids who did enter the church.’ She maintained that faith has been

.....one of the most important interests of my life. And continues to be. And it doesn’t have to be Christianity or the better kind of Islam. I’m very much taken with the poet Rumi who was a Sufi poet and read him every day.  

From a young age, her leaning into spirituality was instinctual and her fondness for reading particularly the nature poets Whitman and Thoreau, was influential.  She increasingly came to appreciate the writings of the classical Roman philosopher, Lucretius. From him she learned about the processes of life: ‘everything’s a little energy.’  Things break down and other things grow out of it;

‘everything is mortal,’ Mary Oliver observed...

...it dies….But its parts don’t die….We know that when we bury a dog in the garden and with a rose bush on top of it. And that’s pretty amazing. What more might there be I don’t know. But I feel pretty confident of that one.

So Mary Oliver’s writing has always been informed by her own intuitions and reading other poets and thinkers. But there’s also another vibrancy at flow in her work, one exterior to herself but still close to home.

Growing up in Maple Heights at that time in the 1930s and 40s, meant living in a semi-rural environment. These woodlands became Mary Oliver’s primary teacher of subject matter for her poetry. Here she began the practice of paying attention which informed her lifelong, steely observation of the natural world. Details of landscape and the character of its wildlife, from early on features much in her writing. With endless patience and growing discipline in her writerly craft, wherever she lived she chose to stay close to nature because this is the place which reliably renewed her own inner spirit. It’s from nature too that she increasingly learned to much prefer the questions, (‘does the opossum pray / as it crosses the street?’) to any given answers. The ‘yes, no, maybe’ response became the most comfortable for her.

Coming back to our opening poem I Happened to be Standing. It can be understood in many different ways, but it reminds me that prayer is something living. It’s dynamic, nuanced and all creation participates in it. Mary Oliver is aware here of that relational moment when we pause in wonder and experience a gentle almost touching between the visible and invisible. She declares, ‘I don’t know where prayers go / or what they do’, but what she does know is that when she is walking through the world with her mind ‘filled with things of little importance’ and ‘…in full self-attendance’, (that is when she is preoccupied by her own thoughts, not the actual environment around her) then she is not ‘really alive.’ A prayer life means to be fully present, awake in the world, and it’s this action which enables the world to become vividly present: ‘The sunflowers blaze / maybe that’s their way.’  And the wren singing in the privet too also shares in this experience: ‘what could this be if it isn’t prayer?’ Essentially, prayer, like faith itself, refuses to be pinned down. It enlivens our experience of the world. We share in it with others.  And all the poet can do is to stand open, ready to receive, and ready to record.

Wild Geese

by Mary Oliver

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.

from Owls and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, Boston, 2003, p. 1

This poem is spare with language but says a great deal. The first part of the poem appears to be a lesson learned, the second how the poet acquired it, and the third part signals possibility. The poem opens: ‘You do not have to be good.’ We are immediately invited into a familial friendship with the poet. The word ‘You’ is repeated at the start of three out of the first four opening lines; the assertions are direct, confident, clear but also gentle in tone. Twice the poet tells us what ‘you do not’ and then once only, ‘you only have to…’ The poet wants to share with us something which she has learned and gently coax us to know this truth. With a warm, personal tone, the words ‘Tell me…’  is the poet’s invitation for us to engage in discussion. And now she is in sympathy that suffering is a part of life. So, the lesson: to be in the world is not about being ‘good’, meaning a life contingent on a life of rigorous aestheticism or penitence. Rather, it’s about being fully human, which means being conscious of ‘the soft animal of your body,’ some deeper and more instinctual love. A body which can be hurt. But a hurt which can be talked about and listened to by another.

Who taught this lesson to the poet? The second part of the poem begins with the word ‘Meanwhile’ (another word also repeated three times) ‘the world goes on.’  This natural world of sun and rain and prairies, taught it to her. The title of the poem is ‘Wild Geese’ but they are not mentioned until over half way through.  But it’s their nature in particular that has much to reveal. Perhaps the ‘wild geese’ referred to here are the Canada Geese which are migratory birds found close to fresh water or marshes, common to temperate parts of North America. Their journey of their coming and going, co-exist alongside ours. We are invited to see them ‘high in the clean blue air.’  For a fraction of a moment the life of the poet, and by extension ours, connects with the existence of the wild geese, ‘heading home again.’

And with these words we enter the third part of the poem. We are now in the realm of meaning, of our imagination. The circumstance of the wild geese not only takes us out of ourselves and reminds us of a bigger hand at work in the world, but also shows that it is possible for that which is ‘harsh’ and that which is ‘exciting’ to be reconciled in the body. Existence has a cutting edge. Suffering is part of life, but we can engage and find new life in it. The migratory wild geese call out this wisdom. And the poet urges the reader now to go on knowing deeply and trusting who ‘you’ are: what longs to be called out in you. Lessons found in the natural world assist us find our own place in the ‘family of things.’ Our own home.

How did Mary Oliver come to this understanding that nature helps us find our place ‘in the family of things?’

As a child Mary Oliver came to call the woods of Maple Heights her ‘extended family.’ They offered safety and retreat from the times of trauma she experienced in her own family. She later said: ‘I saved my own life by finding a place that wasn’t in that house…there was nobody else in that house I was going to talk to. It was a difficult time, and a long time.’ During her adolescence she discovered the beauty and solace of the natural world, and became truly present and engaged in conversation with her surroundings. But she didn’t simply notice and record; she imagined. Validation and inner growth came to her via the capacity of her ‘imagination’ to stay in touch with the ordinariness of wherever she was, but also being open to see more deeply. From these early times and for the rest of her life she always carried around a notebook. She hid pencils in trees, for any future need.  When she was young she kept a picture of William Blake in her wallet, and on the back of it wrote: Uncle Bill.  His claim that he took dictation from angels, informed her own understanding that something other in creation seeks to break into our own understanding of life. This something other wants to help us be whole; it is transformative, lifegiving, creative.

The Swan

by Mary Oliver

Across the wide waters   

something comes      

floating–a slim         

and delicate

ship, filled   

with white flowers–      

and it moves         

on its miraculous muscles

as though time didn't exist,   

as though bringing such gifts      

to the dry shore         

was a happiness

almost beyond bearing.   

And now it turns its dark eyes,      

it rearranges         

the clouds of its wings,

it trails   

an elaborate webbed foot,      

the color of charcoal.         

Soon it will be here.

Oh, what shall I do   

when that poppy-colored beak      

rests in my hand?         

Said Mrs. Blake of the poet:

I miss my husband's company–   

he is so often      

in paradise.         

Of course! the path to heaven

doesn't lie down in flat miles.   

It's in the imagination      

with which you perceive         

this world,

and the gestures   

with which you honor it.      

Oh, what will I do, what will I say, when those

white wings         

touch the shore?

from Owls and Other Fantasies by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, Boston, 2003, p. 10-11

Uncle Blake’s influence continued throughout Mary Oliver’s life. And her poem The Swan, vividly blends together that meeting between our longing to see, understand more deeply and the world around us. The swan featured in this poem may be read as an encounter with a real swan or a metaphor for imagination itself. ‘What shall I do when the poppy-coloured beak rests in my hand?’ What will I encounter when I open myself to receive the approaching mystery of the unknown? The poem also honours the place of the ordinary and prosaic for it’s Mrs Blake who laments: ‘I miss my husband’s company / He is so often in paradise.’ Imagination may feed our inner life; but it also holds us responsible for the ‘gestures in which we honour it.’   It is a vehicle by which we can ‘perceive this world,’ but this seeing deeply, requires an equal response in terms of how we live out our life, in our actions.  ‘Oh, what shall I do, what will I say when those / white wings / touch the shore?’ Her asking this question of herself, is also the question she wants us to ask of our own lives. It's a question she asks in one of her most celebrated poems, The Summer Day.

In her late teenage years Mary Oliver formed a strong friendship with Norma Millais, who was sister of the poet Edna St Vincent Millais. Together they spent a number of years sorting through Edna’s work and Norma’s support was invaluable, I suspect, materially and emotionally for her. Although Mary Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, she never completed these degrees, however later taught poetry and held residences in a number of universities in the United States until 2001. And she grew from youth to adulthood, she learned that living simply and economically can be deeply satisfying. She didn’t need to be materially wealthy. ‘During those years of walking around the woods’ she said, ‘gathering food as much as poems – mussels and clams, (I) was very poor. (I) had decided very early …..to be a poet. So (it) meant not being able to have a car, new computer….A lot of poems I wrote on the kitchen table because I would not give the time and energy to have the job where you could have those unimportant things – nice but don’t need them…One can live simply and honourably on just about enough money to keep a chicken alive. And do so cheerfully.’

The Summer Day

            By Mary Oliver

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?

from The House of Light by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 1990, reprinted in Devotions by Mary Oliver, Little Brown Group, 2017 p. 316

Again, conversational and invitational in tone, The Summer Day acutely observes something as natural as a grasshopper, and interweaves within it probing questions about existence itself. In all, there are six questions, and the first three in the opening three lines. The first question seems to be the most significant of all: ‘Who made the world?’ From this Genesis-like opening, the poet hones right down to all the minute complicated bodily motions of a grasshopper on this particular day and this exact moment. In 'I Happened to be Standing’ she didn’t know ‘where prayers go / or what they do’; and here, she further confesses ‘I don’t know exactly what prayer is.’ But she does know that by this process of examination, this ‘paying attention’ she is moved into a sense of ‘falling down’ with a sense of reverence for the mystery of its existence. Prayer has something to do with worship, ‘kneel(ing) down in the grass’ and feeling blessed. Strolling and being idle has that keen sense of what many Christians would recognise as abiding in the grace of God’s love.

But here it also includes the knowledge of life passing; ‘Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon.’  Life is transient. Therefore, every moment is precious and to be savoured. When talking about this poem, Mary Oliver said: ‘the grasshopper actually existed and I was able to fit him into that poem, and the sugar he was eating was part of frosting from a Portuguese lady’s birthday cake……(it was) personal to me that it was Mrs Segura’s - probably 90th - birthday cake.’ Unlike I Happened to be Standing, here the poet is less interested in the actual act of recording, more in the experience itself, and gently provoking our thoughts to engage in life this way by asking of us -  ‘Tell me what else should have I have done?’ This is her way of bringing us into the experience and savouring it with her. 

But it’s the final question that’s the one which in her wily way she really wants our imagination to take hold of: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one precious life?’ Here the poet’s experience with the grasshopper, and strolling through fields all day, is handed over to us; the ending is deliberately left open for us to now take beyond the poem, to ponder and answer on our own.

In the 1950s Mary Oliver met her future partner, Molly Malone Cook with whom she lived for over 40 years in Provincetown, Massachusetts. And I think it’s in these years, forged by two powerful relationships of love: Molly, and the meditative walks in the natural world, that she was able through discipline and dedication, to nurture her craft into maturity. Her being a mentor for younger poet-students helped clarify her own vocation. Whilst she continued to be attentive to life around her, seeking a language, like harmonies in music, that speak into the heart of what it means to be human, she too found healing and wholeness. 

Molly Malone Cook died in 2005. Although Mary Oliver entered into a deep, long period of mourning and was herself diagnosed with lung cancer in 2012, she was later able to admit that now she emerged from her lifelong solitariness and ‘entered more fully into the human world and embraced it.’  She moved to Florida and felt herself becoming more socially oriented and spiritually mature: ‘I’ve become kinder, more people-oriented, more willing to grow old. I was always investigative in terms of everlasting life, but a little more interested now, a little more content with my answers.’ The language of her late poetry becomes sparser as she draws more from the influence of Rumi. And yet too, her mind kept up a fast pace, and when she writes in her poem, A Thousand Mornings – ‘if I were a Sufi I would be for sure one of the spinning kind,’ one imagines it’s Mary Oliver’s own mind (and body too if she could), that’s pirouetting at full speed.

‘Paying attention’ doesn’t mean that in her perception the poet edits out the unsavoury in favour of life’s blessing. Instead it involves the courage to witness and acknowledge the brutal, destructive. And sometimes the pain of this will feel unbearable. There is an element in many of Mary Oliver’s poems which capture this hard edge of existence.  In her 2003 poem Hawk, the majestic bird is vividly described as falling down through the air like a ‘white blade’ to snatch up its vulnerable prey, some ‘unimportant rustling in the / yellow reeds.’ (Owls and Other Fantasies, p21). Paying attention also has moral implications. In her short poem, Reading the Morning Paper (2012) the ‘disasters’ and the ‘unbelievable / yet approved of decisions’ made by world leaders, prompts her question, ‘What keeps us from falling down, our faces / to the ground, ashamed, ashamed?’ (from: A Thousand Mornings, p.63).

And it is the task of the poet to bring all this to bare in her craft. She writes in her poem Good Morning (from her 2014 collection, Blue Horses, p 23)

Slowly the morning climbs towards the day.

As for the poem, not this poem but any

poem do you feel its sting?  Do you feel

its hope, its entrance into community? Do

you feel its hand in your hand?

Unlike the animal kingdom, our human imagination can bring with it a moral dimension to bare. The ‘gestures with which (we) honour’ the world, to quote again from The Swan may be prompted by a ‘sting’ in the words of a poem. In her interview with Krista Tippett, Mary Oliver said: ‘I also believed, and still believe alarming as the years go on, that we are destroying the earth…..This is what we have, let’s keep it, because it’s beautiful and wonderful and wondrous…... We’re in deep trouble with the environment…and nobody is going to stop this business of ….making money, of amassing of things that will vanish for us as we vanish.’

The sting in Mary Oliver’s poetry she insists is never fiercely confrontational. ‘I believe you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,’ she said. And the sting in the poem doesn’t have to have the last word; it can prod our lives into fruitful action. This is then not only a faith ‘in something other that has to do with all of us and is more than any of us are’, as I mentioned earlier, but it’s also a faith in humanity to face our current ecological clearly, and the choice to work to protect our natural world.

Throughout her life, and until her death in 2019, the poetry of Mary Oliver continued and continues today to bring comfort and compassion for the lonely, but it can also bite. It cuts into our human capacity to indulge, take for granted or abuse. She herself increasingly found a way to negotiate that tricky path between, on the one hand wanting to offer solace, but also simultaneously provoke unease.  The ‘harsh and exciting’ call of the migratory wild geese is her own call to us, her reader or listener, to break free from the idea that faith is something we acquire, to an understanding that like prayer it is dynamic, intuitive, freely available, connecting; it changes and grows. Prayer and faith both help us move towards life and light. They are transformative undertakings in which we are all invited to be a part of. An vital undertaking which seeks to breathe wholeness and health back into our planet’s evolution.

On Travelling to Beautiful Places

            by Mary Oliver

Every day I’m still looking for God

and I’m still finding him everywhere,

in the dust, in the flowerbeds.

Certainly in the oceans,

in the islands that lay in the distance

continents of ice, countries of sand

each with its own set of creatures

and God, by whatever name.

How perfect to be aboard a ship with

maybe a hundred years still in my pocket.

But it’s late, for all of us,

and in truth the only ship there is

is the ship we are all on

burning the world as we go.

from: A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver, Penguin Press, NY, 2012, p. 67