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Mary oliver the journey
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Everybody struggles in a different way, but after the night comes the day. Which is the same as life that has different tragedies; happiness, sorrow, pain, or fear. Every mountain has many hill that goes up and down. Life has also many uphill, and downhill but people have to be prepare to accept the challenge. To be happy in life, we have to be prepared to face the difficulties. Life is not happiness neither sorrow. It is true for everyone’s life. Anything being born with it definitely die, because this is the nature of life. It is the same in the poem “The Journey”, where the poet is trying to explain the nature of life and the nature of the world. As I go through the poem, I understand that our life is temporary here, in this world. Mary Oliver wants to be free from sorrow and pain. She doesn’t want bad advice. The poet wants to be happy and understand the nature of life. The poet …show more content…
In the other hand, the world is beautiful, full of green trees and different kinds of animals. To form a tree, it needs water, minerals, oxygen and mud, or place to grow. We are the same, we need support, good company, and good advice. A flower has its own time to blossom and has its own way to make the world beautiful. We have the same mission, to make our world beautiful, nice, and peaceful. We are the heroes of the world and we are the model of nature. We can do anything but we just have to be prepared for the upcoming struggle and difficulties. In the middle of the poem, Oliver says “mend my life! Each voice cried”. Oliver wants us to understand ourselves before understanding others. Sometimes we depart from our journey in different directions but only the knowledge of oneself can direct us on the right path. Knowledge is gained through observing nature. Whatever Mary Oliver has done in her life to find the truth of nature, she doesn’t want to give it up. She is focused on her grit and she wants to spread her peace of the
Mary Oliver in her poem “First Snow” explores the appearance of nature during winter. Although the poem has no stanza break, it is clearly divided into two parts. First is presented the image of snow falling during the day and second part described the image of night when the snow stopped falling. Snow is compared to “such an oracular fever” which means it has ability to teach the reader to recognize the opposite truth.
Mary Oliver was a famous poet and nature-lover, she used nature as center of her poetries. She was observant and thoughtful, which endowed her poetry a unique charm and depth. In her poem “The Black Snake” also manifests everything in the natural world is equal. This poem narrated that the speaker found a black snake was killed by a truck and thus to start thinking death and life. Meanwhile, Mary’s poetic language also has strong power. This poetry is a simplicity and short but she used many elements of poetry to make this poetry more profound and meaningful, and the symbolism and figures of speech are the two main element in “The Black Snake”. Figures of speech brings value
The narrator who saw the woman cleaning in the airport did not like the scene due to the fact that she believes that there are better jobs and options out there. However, we do not know whether or not the lady actually cleaning feels the same way. Oliver states in the poem, “Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and neither could win”. (Line 13). Even though this situation seems to be very sad Oliver tries to turn a sad situation into a hopeful and joyful situation. The speaker sees how the woman is struggling, but she thinks she is beautiful. Furthermore, the perspective of the speaker shows that the cleaning woman has a right to “stand in a happy place”, which means everyone deserves a good job. Oliver mentions, “Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem, but first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough” (line 16). This quote shows that the narrator dislikes the fact that she is doing such a low job and yet she thinks she is beautiful. The author did not understand her perspective, she has to do this job for a
Nature’s beauty has the ability to both entice its audience and frighten them. Mary Oliver in her passage explains her experiences with the two sides of nature. Her experiences with the owls elicit both an awe response and a frightened one. In connection, her experiences with a field of flowers draws a similar response where she is both astonished by them and overwhelmed. Oliver’s complex responses display the two sides of nature. It's ability to be both captivating yet overwhelming in its complexity. In “Owl” Mary Oliver uses descriptions of nature demonstrated by owls and fields of flowers in order to convey her complex responses to the two sides of nature.
One of the most important points in this book is that no matter what you’re going through you have to find your meaning to life. If you don’t have a meaning to life or something to live for then there’s no chance of you surviving whatever you may be going through. You have to find whatever positive thing in your life to make it through any time of your life. In the book, he wrote this, “For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a
On the surface, "life" is a late 19th century poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar. The poem illustrates the amount of comfort and somber there is in life. Unfortunately, according to Paul Laurence Dunbar, there is more soberness in life than the joyous moments in our existence. In more detail, Paul Laurence Dunbar demonstrates how without companionship our existence is a series of joys and sorrows in the poem, "Life" through concrete and abstract diction.
In the case of the first poem, it was more of the perspective of a high class woman. The narrator who saw the women cleaning in the airport did not like the scene due to the fact that she believes that there are better jobs and options out there. As a woman coming from a higher class, she may think one way. However, we do not know whether or not the lady actually cleaning feels the same way. In line 16, Oliver mentions, “Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place”, in a poem. But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough.” This quote goes to show that the narrator dislikes the fact that she is doing such a low job. The narrator considers that peoples too showy and live only on the external, and the woman
I believe the meaning of the text is that you can't always expect to get what you want out of life. I know this because in the book the author repeats it many times. She talks about how she did not get what she wanted and that life brought her to something better and by times life brought her to something worse. Example: ''sometimes you just don't get what you wish for, sometimes you get something better''.Another example of this meaning is that she often talks about how she always wanted more than just work and school, she wanted to love and discover but she never got a chance because life always kept her from doing what she loved.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
enable us to understand the moral of the poem. Which is work hard and you will receive you goals and never give up.
The speaker introduces the idea of the natural cycle of life, where something becomes born and eventually dies. This reflects back to the Native culture where the cycle of life was much celebrated. The idea of "death and birth" symbolizes the speaker 's love that was once born to die in the end. It also symbolizes the pleasure and pain that comes with falling in love. She was born again with the new knowledge and pleasure the love had to offer. However, it is an undeniable fact that the same love that gave her so much joy at one point, gave her just as much pain. A part of her past- self had to die in order for the speaker to be reborn.
Oliver sets up her poem as a monologue with an implied audience (or at least a companion), as we see when the poem says; “calling us back”, “the darkness we expect” and “assailed us all day”. These expressions
Each generation goes through a struggle. However, we must learn how to persevere. Luckily we have higher generations to teach us how. In the poem, “Mother to Son” it states “And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor…” The older generation (or mother) is saying that life is like a staircase, but the staircase will have problems that throw you off. However, later on in the poem, it says to keep persevering, keep walking through the stairs, or keep going through life even if you’re at the lowest point of your life. I believe that the message of perseverance in
The beginning of the poem one word stands out more so than others. In line 2, 3 and 5, the word ate can be interpreted literally, as if she physically ate bodies of bees or the different parts of the tree. I believe that she uses this term allegorically. The word ate can be used as a means of consumption or to take in. Oliver does not really mean that she took bites out of the tree, but she absorbed the
lies deeper inside of her. She has come to face the fact that she does