Mary Oliver

I Want to Write Something So Simply

art & creativity lyric poem intimate

I Want to Write Something So Simply - meaning Summary

Private Feeling, Shared Recognition

The poem expresses a wish to make language so clear and emotionally direct that a private experience becomes shared. Its speaker wants writing about love or pain to feel familiar to readers, as if they have discovered their own unspoken feelings in it. The poem presents poetry as an act of recognition: personal words gain power when they seem to arise from another person's heart.

Read Complete Analyses

I want to write something so simply about love or about pain that even as you are reading you feel it and as you read you keep feeling it and though it be my story it will be common, though it be singular it will be known to you so that by the end you will think— no, you will realize— that it was all the while yourself arranging the words, that it was all the time words that you yourself, out of your heart had been saying.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0