Repetition in Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”

Exploring the family of things

delights

Published

July 9, 2023

Wild Geese

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.

“Wild Geese” was the first poem I ever memorized. It’s cliché, I know, and so was the setting: I was feeling lost and lonely while walking the Camino de Santiago, days after my Camino soulmate had finished their pilgrimage. This took place over five years ago, when I was desperately trying to “figure my shit out.” I lacked any sense of direction and wanted more than anything to feel at home in the world.

This made me feel bad about myself because I wasn’t present half the time I was walking. I was wrapped up in finding the answer, as if it were sitting in the back of a statistics textbook. (Spoiler alert: I checked in graduate school—it’s not there!) When the weight of the world felt too heavy to carry, I recited “Wild Geese” to myself.

I didn’t read much poetry growing up. I was more partial to drawing, fiction, Captain Underpants, and video games. So if there was any sort of deeper meaning hidden in the poem, it surely flew in one ear and out the other. The lines served simply as buoys against the uncertainty of the future. Would I have enough money to finish the trip? What was I going to do when it was all over? They grounded me when what I needed most was the smell of Spanish soil.

I’m revisiting it now with a sharper eye as a way to train my poetic sensibilities, and to gain a deeper appreciation of poetry in general. It seems more critical these days that we cultivate a sense of magic/poetics/the divine given the domineering effects of our omniscient, omnipotent supersensoriums. We need to carve out refuges where we can devote our attention to all that touches our souls, to what can “startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life.”

Poems are well-equipped for the task. They require that the television—and all our supersensoriums—be turned off. They demand close, careful, repeated readings. They ask, with all the affordances of paper and time, for our imagination and perseverance. In return, we are put in the presence of enriching company, both dead and alive. Your pockets may not be fuller afterwards, but your hearts may be. This alone is worth more than anything.

Okay. Let’s take a closer look at Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.”

“Wild Geese” is centered around a single arc. The heart of it reassures us that it is always possible to find a sense of belonging in the natural world. What more is it than that? Well, part of what makes a poem a poem is the delivery, how it’s composed. Here it feels simple and straight-forward, which is what people tend to love about Oliver’s poems. For some this is a point of criticism, but simplicity itself is not a vice, nor is complexity a virtue. What matters is how these elements are woven together to give us the poem’s intended effect.

Many of Mary Oliver’s poems are prayer-like, almost biblical in nature. This is certainly true of her works in the collection Devotions. There’s a reverence to them, an expansiveness that I feel after reading her verse when my mind is quiet and open. We can attribute this, in part, to the way she employs repetition. Repetition can be used to reinforce a point or message or felt sense. This can take form in the words themselves, or the images, themes, and feelings evoked throughout a poem. They can damn us, as when used for the ends of shaming, or they can serve as the mantras that heal us over time.

I’m reminded of the ten commandments from the Bible at the beginning of “Wild Geese”: Thou shalt not kill… Thou shalt not steal… Thou shalt not use the word Thou Ten Thousand times in a row… This seems intentional when considering the central image in the first chunk of verse (The set of Yous). We have a repenting individual, one who is walking through a desert on their knees in search of redemption. The word choice and repeating Yous draws on our society’s religious roots, suggesting that our wanderer can only be saved by something bigger than themselves. And yet, the section ends with:

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Rather than turn outward toward a religious kind of revival, Oliver appeals to our animal selves, to our basic, pre-religious nature. You do not have to be good she invokes, because goodness is rooted in human morality. We can find salvation elsewhere she suggests, in something more fundamental.

We now arrive to the meanwhiles. These lines are structured similarly to the yous, where the first line depicts an abstraction (good, world), the second line an image of nature (a desert, a dynamic landscape), the last an animal (the soft animal of your body, wild geese). Note, too, that the content within the meanwhiles is growing more vivid relative to their parallel yous, which has the effect of adding richness and momentum to the poem. We are moving from good to the world, from the soft animal of your body to wild geese.

The expectation as a reader, now, is that some sort of resolution must be reached. We have allowed the soft animal of our bodies to love what they love; we have shared our despair with one another; we have witnessed the evolving landscape, the wild geese flying in the clean blue air. Where is the poem taking us?

In the end, Oliver breaks away from her structured repetitions, leaving us with a long verse spilling over several lines. The poem has been building up to this point, repeating itself and its images until at last it resolves into a quiet crescendo. The world is offering itself to you, the wild geese are calling to you, all neatly constrained by the strength of the commas.

And then no longer. The commas are are overrun, and we’re left with a final repetition— over and over announcing your place in the family of things —and two enjambments— harsh and exciting / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things — as if, finally, we have arrived, as if the geese and our imaginations are dancing with each other.

“Wild Geese” begins and ends the way a river does, from the smallness of you at the mouth of the poem, to the expansive refuge that is available when we widen the aperture of our imaginations. The Yous build us up toward the release of despair. The meanwhiles set the stage and lead us to the image of wild geese heading home, again, implicating that this is always on offer for us. And then the poem ends with a final statement, one that condenses the structure and repetitions that have been strewn throughout, reposing in a sense of arrival:

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.

Why go through the mess of reading a poem like this? A more direct person might have said to you “if you’re feeling lost and down about yourself, go into nature.” Partly because life often feels like going through the mess of a poem. We receive banal platitudes and thoughtless advice all the time. But we change only when we ourselves embark on the journey. Sometimes this actually involves working through the nuances of a poem. In the process, you may discover something beautiful. You may find another layer of existence that enriches the way you witness and navigate your life. You may arrive at an answer, or, more than likely, further questions that have the power to guide you.