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The Journey By: Mary Oliver One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing that you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save.
"I am trying in my poems to have the reader be the experiencer. I do not want to be there. It is not even a walk we take together." ~Mary Oliver
1. Sensory Imagery- Began to tremble 2. Metaphor- The poem itself is a metaphor for those who must escape 3. Symbolism- The road full of fallen branches and stones 4. Repetition, small examples, little by little, determined to... 5. The poem is Free Verse.
Mary Oliver was born in Ohio in 1935, and from an early age knew that she wanted to be a writer. She attended several universities, but never received a degree. Her volume American Primitive, (1983), won a Pulitzer Prize. This, much like most of her other works, focuses on nature and reflects a deep connection with the natural world. Oliver is an avid walker, and from this, she receives a lot of inspiration. She has often been compared to Emily Dickinson for her solitude and transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Maxine Kumin, a fellow American poet, author, and former Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, called Oliver a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms and an indefatigable guide to the natural world. Colin Lowndes of the Toronto Globe & Mail thought of Oliver a poet…[whose volume] deals with thresholds, or the points at which opposing forces meet. In addition, Oliver has been compared to Robert Frost, in her style of refering to nature, although less traditional.. Like Frost, at the end of her poems, she points out a concern for humanity or herself, usually an universial theme to which many can relate to.
