“I Don’t Want to End up Simply Having Visited This World”

On January 17^th, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver, whose words title my blog, died.  A stunning observer awed by the small, she could take one tree, a pond, a fox, a flock of geese and stop you in your tracks. Before we know it, we’re invited in, wondering with her. The particulars she describes become candles in a shrine.

Oliver offered this stunning conclusion to her poem “When Death Comes:”

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Strange, but her many obits took me from her, a nature-stunned poet, right to the words of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, words with which, in the past, I often closed my speeches, words that have inspired, and yes, goaded me.  Might this still be a stretch – the rural poet and the deeply-involved social critic?  I’m not certain, but this I know: her poetry immediately evoked Shaw.  Listen to him, his words for me a touchstone:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a right one….being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live.  I rejoice in life for its own sake.  Life is no brief candle to me.  It is sort of a splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

I believe Oliver elicited Shaw because each stood fully-attuned and responsive to that around them, each fully engaged, fully present, never indifferent.