Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day,” is a favorite of mine:
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 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?
As a follow-on to one of my earlier posts “An equation of time,” I want to consider the last two lines of this fine poem:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
While I admire the sentiment of those lines, I think they lack sufficient urgency. After all, planning is enticing and often much easier than doing, but action is what counts. I have been thinking about how to add a sense of immediacy to that couplet without doing too much harm to the elegance of the poetry.
I initially changed “plan” to “want”:
Tell me, what is it you want to do
With your wild and precious life?
This version, however, is little changed from the original and even is less decisive. Wanting in one thing, planning another, but the key is actually doing.
Then I thought I might rephrase it this way:
Tell me, what is it that you have done
With your one wild and precious life?
The problem with this version is that it looks backward and not forward. What is important is not so much what we have already done or what we plan to do; rather it is what we are doing. Now.
With that in mind, I wrote this:
Tell me, what is it you are doing
With your one wild and precious life?
Although I like the changed emphasis, the meter is wrong, and the first line wallows in mediocrity.
After more thought I came up with this:
Tell me, what is it you’re doing now
With your one wild and precious life?
This version puts emphasis on the “now” while maintaining the same meter as the original.
I realize that suggesting changes to such an eloquent poem is impertinent, but I think it important to emphasize that although we have little control over the length of life, we can savor its width and texture, how wonderfully “wild and precious” it is. Two clever wordplays capture this idea well. As my dear friend Len remarked, “Tempus really fugits.” Another friend, Lew, a WWII pilot who died years ago, offered good advice on how to deal with fleeting time when he said, “Carpe the fucking diem.”
I love this beyond words can express! So I’ll allow my socks to speak for me and txt you a picture of my growing collection ;)
Tom, just received this as a gift: Mary Oliver Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. Wonderful! As the the last lines of The Summer Day, I’ve wondered if something like this motivates enactment of good intent:
“Tell me, how will you live into the next act
that life invites you, in your own unique way, to play?”
Hi Tom,
Thanks for forwarding blog.
This poem is wonderful. I love her sense of scale; quickly moving from the world to a grasshopper and drawing the critical question from the humbler being. And I love how observant she is.
Here’s my suggestion to make her question more immediate and imperative.
Tell me what it is that you will do
With your one wild and precious life.
What fine comments. Oliver’s couplet is a strong stimulus for considering how to approach life. I like your ideas, both the wording and the socks that remind us to seize the day.
Although I wrote about the first line, Oliver’s second line of the couplet is perhaps more important: “With your one wild and precious life.” We all know that our life is “precious,” although that is easy to forget as we struggle with the challenges and routines that we face each day. More importantly, I think, Oliver reminds us that our “one” life is indeed “wild.” Wild is an apt adjective for life, which we should take to heart. Too often, we allow ourselves to be fettered and tamed by events, expectations, and daily-ness so that we forget about that wildness. We lose our sense of possibility and too often succumb to resignation. We accept life as the sort of “brutal approximation,” which I wrote about recently in another post.
Dan, I looked through “Devotions” yesterday in a local bookstore. I like what I read, and I think I will get it from the library when it becomes available. You know that I am inundated with books. Coincidently, for Christmas last year, I got a collection of her essays “Upstream.”
I am loving and continuously honing myself into one worthy of its return. As you might imagine, it’s a struggle. I am wrestling with my attachment to things, i.e. “stuff”; “things” seem to be winning. At least I know I am not alone…
Jerry,
It is interesting that you say that since I will be writing a post on “stuff” soon.