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.

Today's poem goes out to my friend Chloe on the anniversary of her birth, though as she is camping today she will not be around to read it. Her favorite poem is "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, which I have never read before she sent it to me, so perhaps this will be a little more "off the cuff" than usual.

My first reaction to "Wild Geese" is how much of the Transcendentalist shines through it, and how it seems as the opposite of Robert Frost's "Desert Places." Frost affirms our innate separateness from nature, that it belongs to itself and we to ourselves only, and Oliver writes as if to provide a balm to the pain that that sense of separation brings. It opens with a rejection of the very religious (and as much Buddhist as Christian) idea of enlightenment through suffering or self-abnegation:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

Rather, Oliver tells us, we ought to indulge our instincts, which tell us to seek the pleasure of human contact:

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.

The next line, "Meanwhile the world goes on," would seem to paradoxically suggest that we are not integral to the world's functioning, but that's not what Oliver is saying. Instinct is the key: Oliver presents geese as the poem's guiding symbol not only because they represent great natural beauty, but because geese instinctively, without ever being taught, return to their "home" every year through migration. In the geese Oliver sees a natural tendency toward order and interconnection with other creatures, an interconnectedness we share, as our body also is a "soft animal." We too have a "place / in the family of things."

So, Chloe, wherever you are camping, though it is probably as wet and horrid as it is here in the city, I hope there are geese, and I hope that when you see them you heard the world call to you, "harsh and exciting," as it does to them. Happy birthday.