Asking Questions
A major theme running throughout the entire body of work of Mary Oliver is the essential importance of asking questions. One can almost immediately identify a poem as being composed by Oliver by whether or not it contains questions addressed to the reader. This poem begins with three questions and ends with three questions. Direct queries are not simply some stylistic gimmick the author happened upon as a way to distinguish her work from others. Questions are an integral part of her philosophy of writing poetry. The recurrence of such questions becomes a running theme spanning her canon, inserted as a way to coerce and subtly force the reader to think more deeply and carefully about the particular specific subjects of individual poems.
The Wonder of Creation
The three questions that open the poem initiate an examination of the theme of the miracle of the tiniest creation. The first question asks who created the world, the next asks who created swans and black bears, and finally who made grasshoppers. Except the questions do not really end there. From the abstract, the speaker narrows down the focus to who made this one particular grasshopper that the poem is about. This last narrowing down is not directly posed with a question mark but is rather an implicitly unasked question. The subject of the questions narrows down from “world” which might as well be replaced with “universe” to the specific grasshopper which might as well be “me” or “you.” The fact that this grasshopper that is eating sugar from the speaker’s hand came into existence is implied to be every bit as wondrous as the creation of a star or planet or mountain or ocean. Whether the handiwork of a supreme being or the result of billions of years of evolution, the existence of literally every object in the universe is such a statistical unlikelihood that it should be recognized as something extraordinary.
Celebrate What You Know
The speaker offers thematic advice: celebrate what you know and avoid anxiety over what you don’t. The speaker announces that she isn’t exactly sure what a prayer is and then immediately puts that to the side to revel in the confessions of things she does know. She knows how to pay attention. She knows both how to fall down in the grass and how to kneel down in the grass, implying the difference is far more substantial than others might think. She then goes on to celebrate her ability to idle time away without being overcome by anxiety. In fact, she has learned to how to feel blessed by doing what others might consider wasting time. What she doesn’t spend time doing is trying to figure out what a prayer is since, when it comes down to it, that is by definition knowledge that is unknowable. She also doesn’t describe how not trying to figure out this mystery causes her stress which interrupts her enjoyment of those things she does know.
