Mary Oliver liked to walk the same path every day.
She lived for decades in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where woods, dunes, marshes and beaches gave her plenty of places to walk. Yet Oliver often chose the same path.
“My own nature is to like to walk the same path every day to see what I missed the day before,” she once explained.
Oliver would retrace her steps simply to look again.
A clam could stop her as easily as a grasshopper, a wild goose, a fox, a rose, a dog, or the light moving through trees. Her poetry was filled with such observations, although the description “nature poet” never pleased her much.
Perhaps she knew it was too small.
A new PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, makes clear that Oliver wasn’t simply looking at nature. She was trying to understand what it meant to be alive.
The film arrives seven years after Oliver’s death at 83 and draws on archival footage, personal photographs, notebook pages and interviews with people who knew her or were influenced by her. There are familiar voices—Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert and Helena Bonham Carter—and poets including Ada Limón, Jason Reynolds and Major Jackson. There is also Mary Oliver herself, elusive and funny, occasionally prickly, talking about the life she spent so much time observing.
Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, in 1935. She began writing poetry as a teenager and found early companions in writers who had died long before she was born, especially Walt Whitman. She eventually settled in Provincetown with Molly Malone Cook, the photographer who became her partner for more than four decades.
In 1984, Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive, a collection of poems largely rooted in encounters with the natural world. She later won the National Book Award for New and Selected Poems.
The prizes tell us something about Mary Oliver. Her relationship with the natural world tells us more. She called nature her “primary source.” Other people went to libraries, she said. She went outside. Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman had done much the same, looking to nature not simply for scenery but for instruction.
Oliver looked with unusual patience. One person in the documentary remembers walking with her and learning not to talk. Oliver was busy “looking, looking, looking.”
“If you love something, you give it a lot of attention,” Oliver said. Give something enough attention, she continued, and “you very often learn to love it.” She called this a form of spiritual investigation.
We look at hundreds of things every day and barely see them. Oliver’s observations plumbed much deeper. She watched a grasshopper eat. She contemplated a clam. She noticed what happened in a field and what happened to the light.
The subjects of her poems were often ordinary things most of us could have seen. Oliver saw more in them.
There was more behind all those hours outdoors. Oliver had a painful childhood. Only late in life did she speak publicly about sexual abuse by her father and the “dark and broken house” in which she grew up. The film doesn’t make that history an explanation for everything that followed. Neither did Oliver.
As a child, she spent long hours outdoors, away from the home she described. She began reading and writing poetry. Decades later, Oliver put into her own words what those two discoveries had meant to her:
“I got saved by poetry,” she said, “and I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
Poet Jason Reynolds introduces another side of Oliver’s looking through her short poem Was It Necessary to Do It? It is about an ant that has been stepped on but is still fighting to live.
“So many people that I know know what it is to be the ant,” Reynolds says.
He is speaking about people whose lives are easily overlooked, diminished or treated as expendable. The ant may be small enough to step over, but it is alive and fighting for its life.
Who gets stepped over? Who goes unseen because a life has been judged too small to matter?
Molly Malone Cook taught Oliver something else about attention. Cook was a photographer, and Oliver said that watching her work taught her “what real attention is about.” She came to believe that attention without feeling was merely a report.
Mary and Molly were together for more than forty years. Near the end of Molly’s life, she was suffering from lung cancer. The documentary takes us to the home they shared overlooking Provincetown Harbor. Molly looks toward the water and asks for toast and a sliced peach. Mary goes to the kitchen, makes the toast, slices the peach and brings them to the woman with whom she had shared most of her adult life.
“With great care,” Oliver remembered.
Molly died in 2005. Afterward, Oliver considered withdrawing from the world. She imagined buying a cabin, filling it with books, writing her poems and shutting the door. Instead, she decided, “I will unlock all the doors.”
She began giving more public readings. People came carrying her books and their own stories of illness, grief, recovery and love. Oliver could see what her poems had come to mean to people she had never known.
Death had long occupied Oliver’s thoughts and poetry. Near the end of the documentary, the camera moves across the notebook in which she recorded ideas and lines. There, in Oliver’s handwriting, are words that would appear in her poem When Death Comes, including her wish not to end up “simply having visited this world.”
The poem also considers “eternity as another possibility.”
Major Jackson stops there.
“What a preparation,” he says. “What a freedom to not go into fear.”
Then he repeats Oliver’s words: “Eternity as another possibility.”
Jackson doesn’t tell us what eternity is or insist that there is one. What catches him is the possibility itself. He thinks about a reader somewhere facing death at that very moment.
“Some reader, someone is facing this moment right now,” he says. There can be consolation in thinking about such a passage, he continues, “while we are alive and breathing.”
Jackson has been considering eternity, but his attention returns to the present. Whatever may follow death remains unknown. This moment does not.
For some, eternity is an article of faith. For others, it remains a question. Oliver chose possibility, a word large enough to accommodate both.
Thoughts of mortality, eternity and the life we are living now have particular resonance later in life. At 25, Oliver’s famous question about what we will do with our “one wild and precious life” can sound like a summons: Where will I go? What will I do? Who will I become?
At 60, 70 or 80, those questions have histories behind them. We have gone places, made choices, loved people and lost some of them. The life Oliver asks about is no longer mostly ahead of us. Her concern about merely visiting this world asks us to look at the life we are living now.
Oliver wrote that “attention is the beginning of devotion.” By this point in the film, those words have acquired weight. We have seen the child who sought the woods, the poet contemplating a clam, the ant fighting beneath someone’s foot, Molly looking toward the harbor and asking for a peach, and Oliver considering eternity.
Later life contains plenty of familiar paths: the same house, the same person across the breakfast table, the same street, the same morning rituals, even some of the same questions we thought we would have answered by now.
Familiarity can persuade us that we already know what is there. Mary Oliver walked the same path every day to see what she had missed the day before.
Perhaps the path has not changed.
Perhaps we haven’t finished seeing it.
Watch Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World
The complete American Masters documentary is available to watch on YouTube.
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