17 pages • 34 minutes read

Wild Geese

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2004

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Universality of the Human Experience

Throughout this short poem, the poet emphasizes the universality of the human experience time and time again. One of the most significant ways Oliver does so is in arriving at the idea of reciprocity: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine” (Line 5). When Oliver first writes “despair,” she doesn’t qualify it with a possessive pronoun. Instead, it stands alone. After the pause of the comma, she adds the pronoun. This simple move allows the reader to first see “despair” as not belonging to a specific person. When she continues the sentence, the reader has an understanding that the despair is shared. It’s an experience that both “you” and “I” have. The person addressed throughout the poem is a tool that furthers this idea of universality. As we move through the poem, we feel that Oliver could be speaking to us. We all have experienced the pressure to be good, the desire to apologize when we’re not or when we’ve erred somehow. When Oliver tells us to just love what we love, we feel understood and grateful for the permission to simply be. However, by the end of the poem, Oliver writes, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely” (Line 14). In this emphasis of “whoever,” we come to understand that the experience she’s been writing, the experience we’ve felt so involved in and so seen by, could be for anyone. With such a simple rhetorical move, she demonstrates the universality of the human experience. In sharing in our aloneness, we flock together like the wild geese.

Insignificance of Individuality

Another important theme present in the poem is the insignificance of individuality. As outlined in the theme above, the reader begins their experience of the poem wrapped in the universal feelings of wanting to be good and to succeed, of the desire to atone somehow when we fail. Oliver comforts the reader not just in demonstrating that we all feel those feelings, but also that they do not matter on an individual scale. This is felt through the experience of the collective, but also in Oliver’s insistence that the world carries on in spite of our struggles. Through the repetition of “Meanwhile” in Lines 8, 9, and 12, the reader is brought out of the small scale of their individual struggle and is instead made to understand the ways in which “[…] the world goes on” (Line 8). In the face of time, we are all insignificant. It carries on without us: the rain moves over the mountains and the geese fly home. The insignificance of individuality acts to reinforce the aforementioned theme of universality; people feel pain, and it matters. We can share these feelings together, however, to help lessen the impact, or to just see that we aren’t alone in our suffering. These ideas find emphasis in the opening lines, which tell us that neither our successes our failures matter, all we have to do is be. In returning home like the geese, we can return to the shared feelings of universality.

Humanity’s Oneness with Nature

Throughout the entirety of the poem, Oliver insists that humans and nature are one and the same. The reader is first clued into this theme in the third line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body” (Line 3). With this phrasing, the reader gets a sense that animals, and thus nature and the natural world, are within us, within our physical form. “Soft” (Line 3) is an important adjective as it further imbues the sentence with a sense of quiet naturalness. The poem then explores the landscape through lush and natural imagery. It’s easy for the reader to feel connected with these lines, and thus the poem not only tells us that we are one with nature, but it encourages us to connect and feel the sun and the clear pebbles of rain. At the end of the poem, Oliver writes, “the world offers itself to your imagination” (Line 15). Much like the animal of the body, once again we get a direct insertion of the natural world into the self, helping us see that the two are inseparable. In the world’s offering of itself to imagination, we understand the way the world lives within us, lives within our thoughts and brains. The reader can feel the world seeping in, thus affirming the oneness suggested in the poem. The world “calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – / over and over announcing your place / in the family of things” (Lines 16-18). In the last lines of the poem, the poet affirms that the humanity and the geese are alike; the world does not discriminate in its calls. The nonspecific word “things” (Line 18) affirms that the family is made up of discrete parts. It is not just a family for humanity, but it is a family for everything that the earth contains; humans, animals, and the earth itself.