Mary Oliver's "Why I Wake Early"

For those of you who look forward to the morning dew, the quiet awakening of the earth, and those few hours before the rest of the lazy human race groans out of bed, than Mary Oliver’s Why I Wake Early is for you. Oliver explores the extraordinary beauty of the everyday natural world around us and shows us poem after poem why she wakes early to watch the world unfold before her eyes.
Newly published in 2004, Oliver opens us to her own vision of the nature around her. One who seems to appreciate nature, as much as Henry D. Thoreau perhaps, she explores its unacknowledged beauty through simple, passionate unrhymed free verse. She explores with both shorter and longer poems as well as the shape it takes on the page to create a diverse collection. The collection, which includes forty-seven new poems, all relate to nature in some way. Whether it is in the simple description of a beetle or toad, or in the deeper question of how nature came to be. This overarching theme is effective and present in each poem, but not overpowering or redundant in any way. In this sense, the book is not predictable in its content individually, though the overall theme may be unsurprising.
Oliver brings us on her morning walks where she finds treasures like an abandoned arrowhead or perfect fall goldenrod and she describes it in a way that is unique and vivid. Her descriptions and thoughts are refreshing and surprising, one leading to the next. She on one hand shares with us a deep desire to understand and connect with the animals she meets in the morning. In “This Morning I Watched a Deer” she wishes she could whisper a poem to the silent deer who nibbles berries from a tree nearby. In “The Best I Could Do”, she expresses the connection she has as her eyes lock with an owl for only a few minutes. And she details the every limb of the toad in “Look Again” as she watches the little amphibian jumps beside her on a path. In all of these beautiful little descriptions, Oliver shows us her deep appreciation for the natural world and her deepest desire to be at one with it.
In another light, Oliver also takes the role of being somewhat unable to comprehend or express natures’ intricacy. In both “Just a minute…said a voice” and “Lingering in Happiness” she touches this complex relationship between the minute human and the vastness of nature. By giving nature this mysterious voice and character, Oliver dives into a whole other level of her collection. She leaves the book open ended and suggestive for us to make our own conclusions of nature.
In the end whether we are morning people or not, Oliver invites us to appreciate the everyday beauty in the nature around us. Who knows, perhaps those of us who prefer to sleep through the magic of the morning will be intrigued after reading Oliver’s collection and think twice next time we hit that snooze button.