The poet dreams of the mountain Sometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts. I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, taking The rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleeping Under the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks. I want to see how many stars are still in the sky That we have smothered for years now, a century at least. I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all, And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know. All that urgency! Not what the earth is about! How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only. I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts. In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.

1980 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for American Primitive
1992 National Book Award for Poetry for New and Selected Poems
1998 Lannan Literary Award for poetry
1998 Honorary Doctorate from The Art Institute of Boston
2007 Honorary Doctorate Dartmouth College
2008 Honorary Doctorate Tufts University
2012 Honorary Doctorate from Marquette University


Works


Notes. On a return visit to Austerlitz in the late 1950s Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook who would become her partner for over forty years. In Long life Mary Oliver says "[I] go off to my woods my ponds my sun-filled harbor no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but to me the emblem of everything.

Mary Oliver (born September 10 1935) is an American poet who has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.