17 pages • 34 minutes read
Mary OliverWild Geese
Mary OliverFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Mary Oliver was a poet concerned with, maybe even obsessed by, nature. The poet has explained that this preoccupation stemmed from a lifelong passion for solitary walks in the natural world. Within literature, there is a longstanding tradition of the flaneur (the French term for “stroller”), but more specifically within poetry there is a deep engagement with one who walks in the outdoors. This tradition finds its grounding in Romanticism. The English poetry movement in the early-19th century centered around the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Blake. All these poets had slightly different conclusions on nature, but all shared a deep love for it and looked to the natural world as a major source of inspiration.
Romantic poetry also shares a belief in pantheism; the belief that all things compose an all-encompassing God. Oliver is often thought of as a Devotional poet; her work imbues nature with a spiritual force that feels pantheistic. Oliver’s understanding of nature may be most closely aligned with Wordsworth, who recognized nature as a living thing, teacher, and god. In her later work, where readers can see a new insertion of humanity, there are also influences of Shelley, who believed that nature is a living thing that shares a union with man. Oliver’s work is in clear conversation with Romantic poetry.
Around the same time as Romanticism in the early-19th century, Transcendentalism was thriving in America. While the key thinkers of the movement, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, were not poets but philosophers, their ideas can be connected to Oliver’s contemporary writing. Oliver’s work does differ from the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements in its deep engagement with colloquial language. Unlike the writers and thinkers of early-19th-century movements, Oliver is concerned with a certain level of accessibility and legibility that more successfully engages with the ideas of universality than Romanticism and Transcendentalism claim to celebrate.
Historical Context
“Wild Geese” was published in 2004. The year feels like a critical moment in which the call to nature was ever-prescient. In the wake of the devastating events of September 11 and the collapse of The World Trade Center in 2001, and the ensuing War on Terror, America lived in a shadow of destruction. Oliver’s message in “Wild Geese” thus feels ever more needed. The call to nature, the emphasis on universality and connection with each other through that universe, all feel urgent in the context of this American landscape. The poem is careful not to engage with the desolation and only briefly invokes it at the poem’s opening with the mention of the desert. Instead, Oliver decides to stay in the world of lushness and offers a remedy to the world in which people may unfortunately be becoming accustomed. This call to nature can also feel more urgent through the lens of the rapid technological advancements present at the turn of the 21st century. Encouraging a deeper connection with nature is important for Oliver at this critical turn in history when the tradition of the nature walker could be easily forgotten. With recent events in world history, including the global pandemic related to covid-19, and the tumultuous events of the US presidency under Donald Trump, “Wild Geese” saw a resurgence in the public sphere, with many people not only sharing the poem on social media but sharing in the poem’s message by engaging in shared, collective despair.
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