Analysis: The Summer Day - Mary Oliver

The Summer Day (1992)

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
5 the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
10 Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
15 which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Oliver begins the poem with three rhetorical questions increasing in specificity. The first question surprises the reader, because the answer should be obvious: God; yet Oliver asks it anyways. This introduces Oliver's theme of questioning authority. The second question compares a swan and a black bear, which are polar opposites in colour, nature, and symbolic elements (swans inhabit the water, while bears inhabit the earth). The reader can then infer that Oliver intends to include everything in between these two opposites in nature within the question. The third question brings the character of the grasshopper, which is observed with unusual attention in lines 4-10.

Oliver uses the grasshopper as a warning to the reader to pay attention to nature and not to take even small grasshoppers for granted. In line 5, Oliver refers to the grasshopper as "herself," which is personification and suggests an equality in value between the speaker and the grasshopper.

After line 10, Oliver abruptly changes her topic with yet another rhetorical question. "I don't know exactly what a prayer is," she says. She contrasts this with "I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down / into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, / how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, / which is what I have been doing all day" (12-15). Using this comparison, Oliver suggests praying is abstract and useless, while love of nature is concrete and tangible. Prayers are said and evaporate into thin air, never to be seen again, while the nature around us can be experienced and should be appreciated. By saying "which is what I have been doing all day," Oliver suggests her actions should be followed.

Oliver defends her actions by asking more rhetorical questions: "Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?" (16-17). With these two lines, Oliver presents her last argument: pay attention to nature and spend life without wasting time on religion. The best way to appreciate life is by not taking things for granted and by trusting only tangible nature.

Finally, Oliver connects her argument to the reader's own life by asking, "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" Life is wild, not to be constrained by religion, and precious, not to be wasted on religion.