"Felicity" by Mary Oliver
fe·lic·i·ty (noun): intense happiness. "domestic felicity" synonyms: happiness, joy, joyfulness, joyousness, bliss, delight, cheerfulness
Mary Oliver’s longtime partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, died in 2005, and just two years later Oliver published Our World (Beacon Press, 2007), a gorgeous collection of writings and personal pictures as an elegy of sorts to Cook. So it was Cook I couldn’t stop thinking of when I first read Felicity (Penguin Press, 2015) a few years ago. It would take a life well-lived with another person to inspire the sweetness, thankfulness and, yes, sexiness within its pages.
Oliver is arguably one of the best-known poets writing today. She published her first collection in 1963 and as recently as October came out with a self-curated collection of her favorite (previously published) poems. Mostly known for poems centering on nature and spirituality, her words are deceptively simple as she ponders heady concepts of life and all its emotions, doubts, and holiness.
Felicity, as the title would suggest, is a collection of poems about happiness and love. You will definitely remember your own feelings of the early infatuated days of a new relationship when she writes words such as, “I did think, let’s go about this slowly. This is important. … But, bless us, we didn’t.” Divided into two major sections, Journey and Love, and ending with a set-apart poem in a third section, “A Voice from I Don’t Know Where,” Felicity’s poems are personal and universal at the same time in that rare way that Oliver excels. It’s not only romantic happiness she writes about but also the celebration of being content with your own self. It would take less than an hour to read all of Felicity but so much more time to reflect on the wisdom and experience revealed in its words.
That last poem I mentioned is my favorite of the collection and also ranks high among my all-time favorites of Oliver’s prolific work. It encapsulates everything I like about her writing: a tangible real-world-ness in her word choice, a love of the natural world, an openness to complicated thoughts. Then it ends with a summary of the intense happiness of a life lived with another. That we may all be so lucky to have “dark and bright wonderings” and someone to share them with.
A Voice from I Don’t Know Where
It seems you love this world very much.
“Yes,” I said. “This beautiful world.”
And you don’t mind the mind, that keeps you
busy all the time with its dark and bright wonderings?
“No, I’m quite used to it. Busy, busy,
all the time.”
And you don’t mind living with those questions,
I mean the hard ones, that no one can answer?
“Actually, they’re the most interesting.”
And you have a person in your life whose hand
you like to hold?
“Yes, I do.”
It must surely, then, be very happy down there
in your heart.
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
—Mary Oliver
Felicity's "I Know Someone" by Mary Oliver
