Why I Wake Early

Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.
-from 'Why I Wake Early'

Mary Oliver's classic collection Why I Wake Early embraces the power and grace that are the hallmarks of Oliver's work.

Why I Wake Early offers glimpses of crickets, toads, lilies, black snakes, butterflies and bears; of sunlight, pinewood and ponds. Here are poems greeting the morning, watching the deer and, finally, lingering in happiness - all infused with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who attends to the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to marvel.

In Why I Wake Early, Mary Oliver reveals, lovingly, what it means to be human and, more simply: why the poet wakes to greet each new dawn.