Nature & Animals Quote by Al Purdy

Purdy takes the grandest noun in the English language - marvel - and pointedly refuses to spend it on God, nation, or art. He spends it on the plainest fact: being here at all. That move is very Purdy: the poet who could sound like a guy at the bar and still land a metaphysical punch. The line starts as an intimate confession ("For me") then widens into a democratic inventory of life ("man, or flowers or beast or bird"), flattening the hierarchy humans love to build. No chosen species, no special pleading. Just aliveness as the only credential that matters.

The subtext is a rebuke to the modern habit of treating life as a problem to solve or a performance to optimize. Purdy isn't praising mere survival; "vividly and perfectly alive" suggests a quality of attention, an intensity of inhabiting the present that can't be captured by status or productivity. Calling it a "supreme triumph" is slyly combative: triumph implies struggle, and in Purdy's Canada - postwar, increasingly suburban, increasingly distracted - staying awake to experience can feel like an act of resistance.

Context helps, too. Purdy wrote against literary preciousness and against the polite national mythos, favoring the raw, local, bodily, real. This quote carries that ethos into philosophy: the miracle isn't transcendence, it's immanence. The highest victory isn't getting out of life; it's getting all the way into it.