The Summer Day
I’d known – and loved – the closing line of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day for years. A family in our neighborhood in St. Paul had made a large mosaic featuring it and hung it beside their front door. Whether walking the dog or running with a friend, I’d pass by their home and each time I’d see it I felt just plain inspired, like someone had opened up a little window onto a world of possibility and invited me to take a peek. Some time later a friend introduced me to the larger poem, which itself is a gorgeous meditation on the blessing of noticing, on the reality of our mortality, and on the way finitude and mortality make all of life more precious, if you are willing to notice and cherish it. And then Kathy, one of our company of ITM readers, reminded me of it in relation to summertime a few weeks ago.
There’s more to say about the poem, of course, tons to say. That’s the way it is with great poems, you can never quite exhaust their meaning through analysis and interpretation. But I think I won’t and rather invite you to read it and see it where it takes you. Because that’s the way it is with great poems, too. You don’t need to analyze and interpret them to enjoy them, even to be changed by them. In fact, sometimes, rather than talk about it, it just makes more sense to read a poem and let it work it’s indescribable but somehow familiar magic on you. Enjoy!
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, first published in House of Light
And, if you’d like to listen to Mary Oliver read it, you can watch the video embedded below.
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I’ve been treating myself to a Mary Oliver poem every day this summer. This is also one of my favorites.
I love this video. Thank you.
Although this has been one of my very favorite poems for fifteen years, this is the first time I have heard Mary Oliver read it. Thank you, thank you, for reminding us to take notice. Isn’t that what gratitude is and a recognition of God’s abundant generosity … simply sinking down, slowing down, and noticing?
This took me to a place to think abut what I would, or should do with the remaining time of my life; that I have one life; I should want it to be more full. I am still thinking about it.