Poem of the Week: You do not have to be good

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.

from “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver

I’m violating an unspoken Poem of the Week rule today: I’ve already featured Mary Oliver. My excuse? Mary Oliver has been astonishingly prolific over the past half-century, and hers is the cleanest, gentlest nature poetry I know.

Some critics grumble that she is insufficiently challenging or unsurprising, but she leans so heavily on the sense of wondrous recognition fed by nature, I wonder if a failure to be moved isn’t primarily a failure of that wonder-sense.

In her 1999 book, Winter Hours, Oliver says:

Years ago I set three “rules” for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose. If a poem to my mind failed any one of those categories it was rebuked and redone, or discarded. Over the forty or so years during which writing poems has been my primary activity, I have added other admonitions and consents. I want every poem to “rest” in intensity. I want it to be rich with “pictures of the world.” I want it to carry threads from the perceptually felt world to the intellectual world.

That unabashed “spiritual purpose” in her agenda would, with another poet, raise my hackles immediately. But Oliver’s poems do not “live” in an intellectual space, nor even an overtly human space. Frequently, the only Homo sapiens traversing her world are the unnamed poet-witness and the rapt reader. Yet her poems make me feel rooted in humanity, grounded in my own body, aware of this lumpy, piecemeal tangle of cells which is somehow, miraculously, taking pleasure in language. Oliver’s poems are spiritual experiences for those who would not necessarily describe themselves as spiritual.

I read Mary Oliver when I need to be calmed and reassured, but I can’t (for tedious practicalities) go lie on my face in clover and count beetles. The first four lines of this poem alone are that kind of comfort. Now, the whole poem:

“Wild Geese”
Mary Oliver, Dream Work

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.