Tell me, what else should I have done?
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day (1992)
Last week:
This week:
Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” (1992)
This may well be the last weekend of the summer in The Hague, and the sunshine is abundant. We’ve had a full week of real summer — hot, blue sky days streaked with gold. Everyone I talk to mentions their hope that plans will all be cancelled so that they can get down to the beach.
And class starts back up for me on Monday, so by this time next week I’ll have made a few turns of the semester’s carousel. This fall, I am teaching three sections of American Literature to 1865 so expect more goodies from way back in the coming weeks here on Select Reading.
This week I wanted to close a long and glorious summer season with this hit from Mary Oliver (1935-2019), “The Summer Day”:
Perhaps you are already familiar with the last two lines, so we will start there.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The phrase “Tell me” participates in the basic rhythm of this poem, written in a free verse which relies upon anaphora for its structure. Remember anaphora? It is a repetitive phrase that appears at the beginning of a poetic line, to make it memorable, and to carry the meaning from one line to another. In this poem, the repetition creates the ground of the rhythm, so that we notice when it is missing, as if a grasshopper has just bounced up from the grass. Here — look at the poem if I mow it down to just the anaphoric phrases:
Who made
Who made
Who made
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who
the one who
who is
who is
Now she
Now she
I don't know
I do know
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,
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me,
with your one wild and precious life?
If you look at it with the repetition isolated in this way, you can see how Oliver directs our attention, lulled as we were by her repetitions into a chill kind of poem about summer, and then she pulls us out of soft focus to look at the grasshopper, This grasshopper, I mean— and later in the poem to go “in the grass” and kneel, and finally the famous 3 questions that close the poem. When the anaphoric lines are interrupted, in other words, we are meant to PAY ATTENTION.
I gave my grandmother a copy of her essay collection, Upstream, and after she passed, the book came back to me. The titular essay is about coming to an awareness of Oliver’s “career as a noticer.” In paying attention, she wrote, the stuff of nature springboards into the sacred, almost immediately. To be holy is to be curious and observant, “brides of amazement” (a line from her poem “When Death Comes”). As the essay “Upstream” closes:
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
And yet, she also writes in “Upstream” that whatever she has to say about the sunflowers,
the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.
In this way, she centers the core complication of representation — that the things we describe are always bigger and more awesome than the words can hold.
Are you thinking what I am thinking? This poem is jam packed with allusions in order to make more meaning of these simple, clear words. Oliver replaces William Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger burning bright” with a grasshopper, when questioning the purpose behind the creator’s fine design. “Who made the world?” She writes. Oliver doesn’t land on the grasshopper first, but the swan, then the black bear — awesome creatures to be sure. But when the grasshopper graces her with company for several lines, the poem turns its attention to idleness. Thanks to Aesops fables and John Keats, Western culture associates grasshoppers and crickets with idleness, with the “summer luxury” of doing nothing but resting in the grass.
The poem drops into observation of this magnificent creature for a short space before dropping the mic on line 11:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
If we follow the logic of “attention is the beginning of devotion” the time and lines spent admiring the grasshopper were the prayer, were the devotion. And what follows in the second half of the poem is the springboard to the sacred. She follows the grasshopper into the grass, and kneels, thus making the summer’s day her church and paying attention her prayer.
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?
There are many ways to read the last three questions, but I like to think of them as challenges to authority, as reproachful toward the world that might be calling her indoors. If we split this poem in two, it becomes a sermon. The first ten lines are the paying attention, or the explication, and the second half is the exhortation.
Line 19 is the question which closes “with your one wild and precious life?”
And suddenly “you” are in the poem. This is what makes the line so instagrammable. The poet addresses the reader, directly, and calls us outside, in the second-person manner of one of her favorite poets, Walt Whitman. Have you seen the grasshoppers out here? Have you tried strolling the fields all day, “idle and blessed?” Mary Oliver is calling you out to enjoy the summer’s day before it dies, before you let this wildness pass you by.
Off to the beach. See you next week.