One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
determined to save
the only life you could save.
MARY OLIVER
Dream Work, copyright © 1986 by Mary Oliver, by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc; any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
As I was with the work of Billy Collins I am pretty much the last person to come to the Mary Oliver party. It took an evening of noodling around on the internet searching for something else for me to discover her properly. I had felt Oliver’s searching and tough-delicate poems kind of bouncing off me a little. I am not proud of it; but it is true.
It came in the form of a blog post by my friend Malcolm Doney, in which he retold the story of Jeremy Paxman grilling Russell Brand on Newsnight, in the wake of the fallout from his prank call, with Jonathan Ross, to Andrew Sachs. I never saw the programme in question but feel as though I have. Brand stated that there are two Russell Brands, the one people go to see and hear, expecting something miraculous, and the idiot who makes prank phone calls. He confessed to making the same mistake himself, thinking he was phoning up Manuel from Fawlty Towers, not somebody’s grandfather. He believed in the icon, not the man.
Not least among the pleasures of reading Malcolm’s piece, therefore, was the physical sensation of feeling my preconceived ideas about Brand being turned on their head. From the sound of it, this is what Jeremy Paxman went through as well.
Paxman concluded the programme with this reflection, that there was important terrain for us to explore between ‘external validation and internal validation’: ‘a matter in essence, of finding yourself, beyond other people’s expectations’ as Malcolm so eloquently put it. At that point Malcolm’s piece stops; he lets Mary Oliver do the talking instead. Her poem is a life lesson I can never learn too often.