American poet Mary Oliver wrote “Wild Geese,” which first appeared in her eponymous 2004 collection. The collection is typical of Oliver’s work; quiet and observant, the speaker wanders through nature using it as a tool through which one can understand the self or the universe as a whole. The poem “Wild Geese” is no exception to this rule, as it offers poignant observations about the simultaneity of one’s insignificance amidst having a firm place in the world. Oliver utilizes nature imagery and symbols to enforce these ideas. Like all of Oliver’s work, “Wild Geese” is informed by early-19th-century Transcendentalism. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were central writers and thinkers to this philosophical movement. Transcendentalism encouraged a deep connection to and gratitude for nature. Nature was celebrated on its aesthetic basis, and also as a tool for which one could better understand the world. Oliver’s poetry’s proximity to these ideas puts it in clear conversation with these ideals. Her poems offer a comforting immersion into the natural world amidst an ever-modernizing world.

Poet Biography

On September 10, 1935, Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio. A semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, there Oliver had some access to the natural world via long walks and outdoor reading that would begin her lifelong exploration. Oliver noted that her childhood was “pastoral,” explaining that her first early connections were to the natural world as opposed to the social world. Her father Edward William was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. Oliver described her family as dysfunctional, explaining that though her childhood was difficult (she was sexually abused and, as a result, experienced recurring nightmares), writing allowed Oliver to escape by being the creator of her own world. At the age of 14, Oliver began writing poetry. When she was 17, Oliver went to Austerlitz, New York to visit the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet of whom she was fond. There she formed a friendship with the late poet’s sister Norma, and the two spent the next seven years organizing the poet’s papers. She even spent a brief amount of time living in Millay’s home. Oliver was notoriously private, but it has been revealed that during her time in Austerlitz she met her longtime partner Molly Malone Cook, with whom she would later move to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Oliver spent time studying at both The Ohio State University and Vassar College, though she earned degrees from neither school. Her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963 when she was 28. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. She won the Cristopher Award and the L.L.Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990), and her 1992 collection New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. In 2017, Oliver released Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, the final book published in her lifetime. It was a New York Times Bestseller, in addition to earning a prominent place on Oprah’s Book Club’s “Books that Help Me Through” list.

In addition to her success as a poet, Oliver was an esteemed prose writer, and a highly regarded writing instructor. Her essays appear in the 1996, 1998, and 2001 volumes of Best American Essays. In 1986 she was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University, and in 1991 she was the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College. She then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.

Oliver also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. After her partner’s death in 2005, she relocated from Provincetown to Hobe Sound, Florida, where she would live until her death in 2019 at the age of 83.

Poem Text

Oliver, Mary. “Wild Geese.” 2004. University of New Mexico, Physics Department.

Summary

“Wild Geese” begins in the second person with a simple directive: “You do not have to be good” (Line 1). The poet further explains what one does not have to do, and instead of getting down on your knees and repenting, one must just let themselves love. The poet then goes on to ask the “you” to share their despair in exchange for the poet’s. Amidst one’s despair, “the world goes on” (Line 7). The sun continues to shine, and the rain continues to fall all over the earth. In Line 12, the poet finally arrives at the geese, who fly above in the sky, returning home. The poet then writes, “Whoever you are” (Line 14), showing that the “you” to whom she’s been speaking is not a specific person but a general address that could be applied to any reader. From there, the poet continues to explain that one’s loneliness does not exclude you from the world. The world is free for you to imagine, “it calls to you like the wild geese” (Line 16). In the final two lines, the poet affirms that the world is always calling to you, and that it does so to remind you of your place within it.