Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

This line is from Mary Oliver’s poem “The Summer Day,” a widely anthologized piece in which the speaker begins with close, reverent attention to the natural world (famously, a grasshopper) and then pivots to self-interrogation. The quoted question appears near the poem’s end as Oliver turns from observation to existential urgency, pressing the reader to consider how they are spending their “one wild and precious life.” The poem’s setting is an ordinary summer day outdoors, and its rhetorical movement—from noticing to moral/spiritual reckoning—reflects Oliver’s characteristic practice of using nature as a doorway into questions of meaning, presence, and purpose.

The question contrasts mere biological continuation (“breathing just a little”) with a life that is consciously inhabited. Oliver’s phrasing implies that existence can shrink into minimal maintenance—routine, fear, distraction—while still being mislabeled “a life.” By addressing the reader as “Listen,” she creates an intimate, urgent summons to attention and agency. The line functions as a moral prod: to notice the world, to choose what matters, and to live with deliberateness before time runs out. It encapsulates Oliver’s recurring theme that wonder and responsibility are intertwined: paying attention is not passive, but a way of becoming fully alive.