Wild Geese

-Mary Oliver

The beauty of art is, its lets you have your own opinion and interpretation! So here’s my interpretation of the poem.

This poem is a beautiful description of how “time and tide waits for none.” We can wait around, telling each other stories about how harsh life has been, but the world will still go on. “Whoever you are no matter how lovely, the world offers itself to your imagination” I think that line talks about things that can happen before we can even think! The world unravels itself to us, and we’re standing on its red carpet, naïve and small. Which gets us back to the lines “you don’t have to be good” and “through the desert repenting” because we ought to let the soft animal of the body love what it loves. We don’t have to be ‘good’, means that we don’t have to sacrifice anything, there’s nothing wrong in being selfish. Walking on our knees through a desert of repentance, tells us about forgiveness. We must learn to forgive ourselves, because there’s a soft animal inside us, calling out to us. What is an animal? Is it a beast that seeks destruction? Or could it mean a creature that only cares for itself and its family? It simply symbolizes selfishness, and there being nothing wrong in it.

The world can call out to us in the form of wild geese, sun and rain… which brings us to the line “sun and the clear pebbles of rain” The sun is the silver lining to the dark clouds that shower pebbles of rain. The word ‘pebble’ shows smoothness on the outside, yet when it hits us, we hurt badly. But after the rain the sun comes out! And we all know the sun lies behind the clouds; it just takes time for the clouds to move! Similarly, when life seems to shower us with problems, we can reach out to our inner soft animal while we wait for the happiness to come back. After all we never know what is good and what is bad until we experience it. So in future we can know what to avoid, and continue our journey.

So to sum it up, Time and tide wait for none, but will bring a new light! As the line;

                                                         The world… over and over announcing your place,                                                                                                       in the family of things.