Wild Geese
Wild Geese - meaning Summary
Belonging Without Self-punishment
"Wild Geese" rejects the idea that people must earn belonging through guilt or self-punishment. It acknowledges despair and loneliness but places them within a continuing natural world of rain, landscapes, and migrating birds. The poem invites readers to accept their bodily desires and imagination, suggesting that every person already has a place in the larger community of living things.
Read Complete AnalysesYou do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
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