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Jack F.'s avatar

Thinking about poetry, affection, and accessibility, I find myself thinking about music. There are songs from the ''60s and '70s, when I first began listening to popular music, that I love unabashedly; there are musical theater songs that I play when I want to raise my spirits. So many of these songs I love (I'm almost embarrassed to mention titles but I'll offer two: "Happy Together" by the Turtles, and "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray) are hardly Schubert or even Lennon-McCartney/Sondheim but something about them (the melodic hook, a stray lyric, the rhythmic drive) strike a chord in me. I'm so glad they exist in the world, no matter where they rank on any artistic/aesthetic scale. That's the way I feel about certain poems. I love them, and can even tell you why, but the reasons aren't those that I bring to bear when asked what makes a poem great. When I am in their presence, I feel like I suspend judgment and simply enjoy them.

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Melanie Bettinelli's avatar

I think Mary Oliver earns the oft-quoted question at the end of The Summer Day by the particularity of her careful and meticulous description of the grasshopper in the middle of the poem:

"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."

The poem begins with three questions and ends with three questions, as if it's a kind of catechism.

The first three questions echo the questions that God asks Job: who made the world?

I like that it doesn't stay at that general level but drills down to the particular, to a moment in time, an image. And that image is a sort of communion with the natural world, the grasshopper eating out of her hand, it's a kind of Eucharistic image.

But Oliver follows that image not with answers but with uncertainty, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." As a person of faith, it seems to me that if she could answer her first three questions she might come closer to knowing what prayer is. But she shies away from that encounter. She turns away from seeking God the maker to enjoy the beauties of the created world. Which are truly lovely. There is something of a sabbath mood of the image of her being idle and blessed and strolling through the fields and paying close attention to grasshoppers, just as in other poems she's paid attention to swans and black bears, as she alludes to in her other opening questions.

So yes on one level she earns those three final rhetorical questions, which suggest a sort of Thoreau-ian call to seize the day.

And yet... indeed this spirituality falls short for me. Communion with nature is a necessary and natural first step, but she doesn't seem to go beyond her questions to actually trying to nail down an answer. She doesn't offer praise to the one who made the grasshopper, except, perhaps by implication. Is asking "who made thee?" in echo of Blake enough to constitute a sort of prayer? I might be tempted to think of it as a kind of prayer if the speaker hadn't undercut that motion by disavowing a knowledge of what prayer is. Unlike Blake, Oliver doesn't offer an answer. Blake tells us that the one who made the lamb was himself called a Lamb. Blake offers explicit blessing in his twice repeated line of the final couplet: Little 'Lamb, God bless thee.'

I contrast Oliver's grasshopper, too, to Hopkins Windhover, another faithfully observed poem wondering at a creature of the natural world. Yet Hopkins makes the praise explicit in his poem with the dedication "to Christ our Lord".

So for me as a reader, Oliver's questions at the end of Summer Day stir me as good carpe diem poems should do.

"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?"

But this little catechism at the end also leaves me a bit sad that she doesn't press into the first three questions more. The second set of questions wants to be exhilarating, and does exhilarate with a call to live, to enjoy the sabbath joy of communion with nature in the fields. But at the same time they imply that one doesn't have to answer her first set of questions, one doesn't have to praise the Maker. It is enough to simply pay attention, to kneel in the grass not to pray but to observe nature. It is enough to be idle and feel oneself to be blessed, she implies. But I don't agree. If everything dies and death is universal then life is too short not to make lazy jabs at God without holding harder to the quest for answers. If everything dies then it's not enough to spend my wild and precious life merely observing and wondering, I think a poet needs to do more. There is the work of praise. Granted, this is more of a theological argument than a poetic one. But it's why I find Oliver's spirituality a little flat. It's a bit too much moral therapeutic deism for me.

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