Desert Island Poems: The Gardener by Mary Oliver

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The Gardener

Have I lived enough?

Have I loved enough?

Have I considered Right Action enough, have I

come to any conclusions?

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?

Have I endured loneliness with grace?

I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.

Actually, I probably think too much.

Then I step out into the garden,

where the gardener, who is said to be a simple man,

is tending his children, the roses.

Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings, p. 7

© 2012 by NW Orchard, LLC

First published by Penguin Press 2012

What makes Mary Oliver so popular? I write this at the end of July, 2026 which sees the launch in the USA of Saved By the Beauty of the World, a cinematic documentary about her life and work. So, I saw this as an apposite time to sit down and hold one of her poems up to the light, to try and come up with some answers to this question. While we think of Rupi Kaur and Donna Ashworth as Instagram poets (and very successful they are in sales terms, too, artistry aside) I think that Mary Oliver may well give them a run for their money. The reason I write this is because Oliver's Instagram page is a awash with her own poems, and in many ways it's the perfect fit for them. Why? Because Oliver's poems fit nicely onto a single Instagram post. I found this out yesterday, and after a while found myself taken in with her easy lyricism and the highly palatable, highly accessible nature of her short verses.

As those of you who follow my Desert Island Poems posts will know by now, I'm a fan of Derek Mahon's maxim that a poem should have 'soul, song and formal necessity.' Oliver, as the Americans might say, majors on 'soul' follows this up with song-like elements, but really is light, or 'lite' (another Americanism) on form. Is this a problem? Is there a point where two elements of that triumvirate work so well that we're willing as readers to overlook the lack of formal backbone? Well, with these questions in mind let's have a look at The Gardener, the most recent poem on her Instagram feed.

Voice

One of the charms of Oliver's poetry is the conversational voice and the immediacy of her opening lines. So often I read poems with such off-putting openings, whether it's a clumsy rhythm in the opening line, or just something so pedestrian or unoriginal that I can barely get to the end of the poem. However, say what you like about Oliver, she's got a knack of opening a poem in a way that draws you into it beautifully, even if the poem trails off, which I've found tends to happen in some of her work. Oliver seems to walk a very fine line between the trite and the original, between the mawkish and the genuinely moving. We can see this in the opening of this poem which starts with two rhetorical questions where she changes 'lived' for 'loved'. Now, these opening lines could spell disaster but then she takes the poem in an unexpected direction where she writes 'Have I considered Right Action enough, have I...' Such juxtapositions of James Wrightian epiphanies ('I have wasted my life.') with quite odd, intriguing, specificity of 'Right Action' and its relation to Buddhism, deepens the poem and makes it stranger and therefore more beguiling. The overhanging 'have I' is a bit much for me, but to have it at the start of the next line would mean three lines that start with 'Have I' which would make the poem less visibly appealing. The short opening questions are then juxtaposed further with the longer more verbose, almost self-disparagingly over-contemplative 'Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?' This is later confirmed and undercut with the self-reflexive 'Actually, I probably think too much.' It's this constant, or rather fleet-footed looping back and veering and juxtaposing which I think is at the heart of Oliver's skill, and for all the sentiment (which for me at times borders on a kind of sloppy solipsism) she is a skilful poet, when at her best.

The Ending

The poem ends then with the poet stepping out into the garden and seeing the gardener, in a way which makes him seem the exact opposite to everything she's just been saying she is. He is painted as a picture of serenity in comparison to her neuroses and constant self-questioning. The final image, though, (and very skilfully, and to Oliver's credit) makes us go back to the opening lines and re-read them in a new light. We find ourselves asking: has the gardener lived enough? has the gardener loved enough? Well, yes or no, it doesn't really matter because he's concerned with something outside of himself, he is enacting the Right Action she is so neurotically deliberating about herself. The final image of the gardener speaks to and answers the questions posed at the start of the poem, and answers them by debunking them, rendering them irrelevant questions, questions of passivity in the face of action, or Right Action.

The Last Line

There is one more deft touch Oliver leaves us with, though, and this is seen in the last line where she writes of how the gardener is 'tending his children, the roses.' The success of this line rests on 'his children' and is another example of how Oliver can so narrowly avoid triteness with neat, light touches like this one. Not only would ending the poem with the gardener 'tending the roses' be a rather cliché and pedestrian ending but is also rhythmically uninteresting and flat. The extra syllables and stresses of 'his children' give the line a more pleasing fluency and finality. But more than that, the presentation of him as a parent and the roses as his children is poignant, suggesting an almost surfeit of care for the natural world and its beauty. The preceding line where she writes he is 'said to be a simple man' is also telling, in that she's emphasising this notion that simplicity and stripping away of the neurosis felt at the start of the poem is essential in finding a sense of contentment. That he is 'said to be a simple man' is important as it leaves the door open for the fact that he might not be simple but at least gardening allows him to be so.

Saved by the Beauty of Mary Oliver?

A formalist poet Mary Oliver is not. A poet of allusion and high literary reference she is not (or at least not on the surface). A poet of great variation she is probably not either. But, she is a poet of soul, a poet of skill, a poet of deft touches, a poet who teaches we the apprentices how a word here or a line break there can be the difference between the trite and the tremendous.