Mary Oliver's "The Summer Day" was originally published in 1992 in her collection of poems entitled New and Selected Poems. "The Summer Day," one of Oliver's most celebrated and well-known poems, is a part of that collection.
"The Summer Day" is a meditation on, as the title suggests, summer; it is also a meditation on what it means to be human. The poem also asks questions that many people have pondered over their lives, questions like who made the world and who made the grasshopper.
Oliver spoke very little about her life and childhood until a 2011 interview with Maria Shriver, the former wife of movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. She said that she had a fairly difficult childhood and a dysfunctional family. To cope with her struggles, Oliver told Shriver that she began to write so that she could "create her own world" to escape into. Her writing is certainly escapist but is frequently a powerful meditation on nature, humanity, and romance - among many other topics. Women's Review of Books wrote that Oliver was an "indefatigable guide to the natural world, particularly to its lesser-known aspects."
