"Law Like Love"

I’ve started flipping through my burgeoning collection of poetry books, but nothing's really called out to me except for the first poem in another Mary Oliver book that I borrowed from the library, and since I just wrote something about Oliver, I decided to look back over the samplers instead. Alternately skimming and reading the post-war sampler again, I was struck by how much I liked W. H. Auden’s “Law Like Love” on second reading. The first time, as I recall, only the last stanza out to me. It sounded so incredibly cynical about love that my internal skeptic could barely contain its glee. But I had a whole sampler to finish reading, after all, so I continued on without reading the poem a second time.

Coming back to it now, I think I like it because Auden’s tone throughout the whole poem (at least, in my opinion) seems subtly pessimistic. It seems to me like he’s calling out society; we always act like we know how things are, like we’re right, like we’re good, when in reality we don’t and we’re not. The last line is what really seals it for me. “Like love we seldom keep.” It sounds almost scathing. I suppose you could read it as a reference to loves lost, but my gut instinct is to read it as a reference to how fickle people can be—an accusation rather than a lament. When I first read the poem, without really stopping to think about it, I took it as a quaint observation of how everyone defines things differently, using the example of both love and the law. But I think there’s actually this subtle undercurrent of cynicism going on. The way I interpret it, law isn’t necessarily what we think it is, and neither is love. We build up these grand ideas about these concepts, romanticizing and idealizing them, but in fact they aren’t quite so grand as we imagine. The law isn’t perfect, and neither is love. Both are flawed, unstable, and ultimately unreliable. That’s my take, anyway.

I think the form of this poem also makes it really effective. It’s not so repetitious that it gets boring, but it’s not so formless as to be uncompelling. His language is understandable and clear, and it sounds to me like the way people actually talk. Also, it’s kind of fun to read out loud; it helps you see the differences between the stanzas and the different people in them. Furthermore, I just like the comparison between love and the law. I think it’s very clever.

"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.

            —Mary Oliver

I was amused when we talked about Robert Frost in class, and how everyone always gets some version of “The Road Not Taken” when they graduate from high school. It’s true, yes, but it didn’t happen to me. My graduation poem was “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. Me personally, I own just two books of poetry; one is a small collection of Lord Byron poetry that my aunt gave me for my twelfth birthday (I'm pretty sure I've never even read it), and the other is a Mary Oliver book called Owls and Other Fantasies.

My acquisition of the latter occurred at the graduation party of one of my closest friends. I like this story a lot, so I’ve decided it’s relevant. The party had ended over, everyone else had already left, and my friend and I were sorting through her graduation gifts. When her mother called her out of the room to discuss something, I idly picked up one of the gifts—a book of poetry—and flipped it open to the first poem. It was probably the first (and possibly still the only) time in memory that I’d read a poem and felt such an immediate and strong visceral reaction. When my friend came back into the room and found me teary-eyed, she promptly said, “Hey, I got two copies of that book! You take that one!” and, ignoring my protests, she crossed out the inscription, wrote her own for me, and gave me the book.

For the almost three years since then, “Wild Geese” has been my favorite poem. Admittedly, since I never really read poetry before, having a favorite poem at all is a bit of a stretch. It probably would have been more appropriate to simply call it the only poem I liked. But now, having read a nice amount of poetry for this class and then coming back to read “Wild Geese,” I still say this one’s my favorite.

I’m not sure I can actually explain why it affects me so strongly, since I feel like it’s on a very personal level. I just love everything about this poem. I love its structure, and its clarity, and its imagery. I don’t feel like anything is minimized in this poem. Individual experiences are valuable, and they in turn contribute to the value of the world as a whole connected entity. It’s like, you need all the parts to make the whole. I also really love the connection of the human experience to nature; it makes me think, “This is natural. What you’re experiencing, it’s natural, and it’s all right.” Oliver never feels grandiose or condescending to me. We were talking in class last week about some poet who wrote as if she were better than everyone else. One of the great things about this poem, I think, is that it feels as if we’re all on the same level. Poet, reader, geese, rain. The way Oliver writes it, I feel like we’re all necessary and equally worthy parts of the same beautiful experience.

I really wanted to write about this poem because I love it so freaking much, but I think I’m having the hardest time because of that. It’s extremely difficult for me to explain myself in words.

Anyway, rather than cynical old Frost, I think they should give kids this poem when they graduate.