Mary Oliver and 'The Summer Day'

Mary Oliver and "The Summer Day"

This article relates to My Friends

Fredrik Backman's new novel, My Friends, repeatedly quotes "The Summer Day," a well-known poem by poet Mary Oliver (1936-2019).

Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a small, rural town less than 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Her upbringing was "chaotic" and she experienced sexual abuse at a young age, eventually finding solace in nature and spending her free time exploring the forests and wetlands near her home. "I got saved by the beauty of the world," as she put it in a 2015 interview.

By age 13, Oliver knew she wanted to be a writer, and by age 14 she had started writing poetry. In 1950, she visited Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, the home of the poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay, which had a profound impact on her. She connected with Millay's sister, Norma, who was organizing her recently deceased sibling's papers, and Oliver became a permanent resident there after her high school graduation. Her exposure to Millay's work during the period heavily influenced her own poetry.

While at Steepletop, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her long-term partner. The two were instantly attracted to each other; Cook became Oliver's literary agent, and helped her publish her first collection of poetry, No Voyage, and Other Poems, in 1963. The pair moved to Cape Cod later that year, where they remained together until Cook's death in 2005.

Oliver was a prolific writer and has more than 30 collections of prose and poetry to her name. American Primitive, her fifth book, won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and in 1992 her New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award. Her works are largely about her experiences in nature, encouraging her readers to observe and celebrate the beauty around them.

Arguably her most famous poem is "The Summer Day," first published in her 1990 collection House of Light, which won both the Christopher Award and the LL Winship/PEN New England Award:

"Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"

In My Friends, an artist often shares these last lines with those around him. Of course, Backman is far from being the only person to quote the lines; their use is ubiquitous, appearing on mugs and t-shirts, as tattoos, taped to bathroom mirrors—anywhere and as anything people look to for inspiration.

You can listen to Oliver read the poem at The Kid Should See This.

Filed under Books and Authors

This "beyond the book article" relates to My Friends. It originally ran in June 2025 and has been updated for the May 2025 edition. Go to magazine.