Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver’s line comes from her poem “The Summer Day,” a late-20th-century lyric rooted in her characteristic attention to the natural world. The speaker begins with close observation—wondering about a grasshopper’s ordinary, bodily life (eating, moving, looking around)—and then turns the gaze back on the reader in a direct, almost conversational challenge. Oliver, long associated with the landscapes of Provincetown and New England and with a poetry of contemplative walking and looking, often uses nature as a doorway into ethical and existential reflection. Here, the question arrives after sustained noticing, as if careful attention to life’s small creatures clarifies the urgency of one’s own choices.

The question frames life as both “wild” (unruly, unrepeatable, not fully controllable) and “precious” (finite, valuable), pressing the reader toward intentionality. Rather than offering a doctrine, Oliver uses a single, piercing inquiry to shift from passive existence to conscious purpose: what will you do with the limited time you have? The line’s power lies in its blend of tenderness and insistence—an invitation to awaken, to choose, and to live in a way that honors mortality. Coming after the poem’s patient attention to a grasshopper, it also suggests that meaning begins in noticing: reverence for the world can become a catalyst for a more deliberate human life.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” (line breaks as in the poem)
“Tell me—what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (punctuation variant)
“Tell me, what do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (common paraphrase)