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The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.

Mary Oliver

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Mary Oliver
Age: 83 †
Born: 1935
Born: September 10
Died: 2019
Died: January 17
Climate Activist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Maple Heights
Ohio
Mary Jane Oliver
Room
Participants
Rooms
Lectures
Inside
Listened
Building
Chair
Doe
Chairs
Feel
Poem
Stuffy
Feels
Uncomfortable
Participant
Reader
Lecture

More quotes by Mary Oliver

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You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.
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I feel the terror of idleness, like a red thirst. Death isn't just an idea.
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Attention without feeling is only a report.
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Look for verbs of muscle, adjectives of exactitude.
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Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
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Everybody has to have their little tooth of power. Everybody wants to be able to bite.
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My work is loving the world.
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Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable. I don't really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible.
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What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy.
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Praying It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.
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I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.
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There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
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I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.
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When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.
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...whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh & exciting - over & over announcing your place in the family of things.
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You must not ever stop being whimsical.
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Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
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Life is much the same when it's going well-- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
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Wild sings the bird of the heart in the forests of our lives.
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Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
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