I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a deep appreciation for the beauty of nature and the overwhelming feelings it can evoke.
Mary Oliver's quote captures the essence of renewal and the emotional intensity that comes with the arrival of spring. The imagery of spring flowing over a starting point symbolizes new beginnings and the beauty of nature, while the feeling of potentially 'drowning' suggests an overwhelming connection to the vibrant life and beauty that spring represents, illustrating how deeply one can feel in response to the natural world.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the impact of nature on our emotions, you could use this quote to illustrate the profound connection we feel in spring.
More from Mary Oliver
All quotes βAt the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
Similar quotes
Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.
Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
But the trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me nearer.
There is another sort of day which needs celebrating in song -- the day of days when spring at last holds up her face to be kissed, deliberate and unabashed. On that day no wind blows either in the hills or in the mind.
It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.
May this continent, the last explored by humankind, be the first one to be spared by humankind.