When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom taking the world into my arms.

This passage is from Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes,” a late-20th-century meditation on mortality shaped by her characteristic attention to the natural world and to daily, embodied living. In the poem, Oliver imagines death arriving in ordinary guises (as “the hungry bear,” “the measle in the icebox,” etc.) and uses that inevitability to sharpen the question of how one ought to have lived. The quoted lines occur near the poem’s close, where she states what she hopes to be able to say at life’s end: that she met existence with wonder and wholehearted engagement rather than detachment or fear.

In these lines, Oliver imagines a life lived in reciprocal union with existence itself. The “bride married to amazement” suggests a vow of fidelity to wonder—an orientation toward the world in which astonishment is not occasional but constitutive. The reversal in the next line—“the bridegroom taking the world into my arms”—adds agency and tenderness: the speaker is not only claimed by wonder but also claims the world, embracing it as one would a beloved. Together, the paired images dissolve the boundary between self and nature, portraying attention, gratitude, and wholehearted presence as a kind of marriage. The wish “When it’s over” frames this as an epitaph: a hoped-for summation of a life devoted to awe.