The Sun by Mary Oliver

The Sun
Mary Oliver

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

SELECTED BY THE ESTATE OF MARY OLIVER

This is how Mary would introduce the poem (direct quote from one of her readings):

“I tried to think of how I could construct a poem so that, if a person opened a magazine, not a poetry magazine but a general magazine, and found a poem, they would read it and stick with it. In other words, not the pre-converted person that was looking for a poem, but the person looking for a nice scientific article that comes across a poem – how could I keep them there? And this was actually the genesis of many of the poems in the earlier books, at least, that are very vehement and fast and run down the page, and have a lot of visual pictures in them…I also decided that anybody who starts a sentence is probably going to have the curiosity to finish that sentence. And you could stretch a sentence to 36 lines…”

My thoughts on this: I was incredibly lucky to grow up with Mary Oliver as a part of my family. What made her so extraordinary was twofold. First, it was the way she saw the world. You can imagine what it was like to have Mary as a kind of grandmother figure—she found magic in everything. And not the kind of magic that leads to imaginary games, but something real and grounded: the quiet, shimmering magic of nature and the way everything coexists. And then secondly, what made her so special as a poet, was her ability to translate that way of seeing into language that just about anyone could understand and feel. Her poems give all of us a chance to pause—to feel a moment of childlike wonder about a bird we’ve seen a million times before, or a flock of geese messing up our lawn.

I love the idea that she wanted more people to experience that pause. She set out to find the non-poetry readers and give them a chance to feel this. And, as she so eloquently says, who doesn’t have the curiosity to finish one sentence?