
When does having a second opinion transform from helpful advice to controlling and restricting behavior? Advice is repeatedly sought out by people looking for confirmation, help, or direction. Though advice given is not always extremely helpful and can lead to bad decisions, the intent of advice is primarily to be beneficial. Mary Oliver’s depiction of advice in her poem “The Journey” is unwanted and burdening, preventing the subject from reaching the life they truly want to live and lead. She uses personification and imagery to thoroughly describe this journey and the subject’s limitless impediments, and intends for her poem to be heard as well as read to be most effective to the reader. Mary Oliver, in the poem “The Journey,” uses vocabulary to illustrate resolute obstacles in one’s life and mind and depict the complexity of self-discovery.

Mary Oliver’s exceptional word choice and delivery play a huge role in the effectiveness of her poem on the readers. Her use of “you” in the poem enables her to speak directly to the readers to truly connect them to the idea of their own personal journey. This reflection allows the readers to become aware of the restrictions and weed out the ones present in the journey to finding themselves. The confining forces in the poem are introduced seeking to influence the subject by “shouting their bad advice” obviously in vain as the subject makes it clear the advice he or she receives is of little to no importance (Oliver 4-5). Though many people are unlikely to connect to the struggle Mary Oliver depicts in her poem, she is able to allow everyone to at least understand it by relating the emotional feelings to physical feelings. She uses descriptions such as “the old tug at your ankles” and the “wind pried with its stiff fingers” to help the reader imagine being physically restricted and how this physical constraint is how the subject being emotionally restricted may feel (Oliver 8-9;14-15). The word choice Mary Oliver uses allows the reader to not only imagine this physical and emotional restriction but also understand how hard it is to break from those bonds.

Examples of exemplar influential forces are friends, family, and societal norms. Starting at a young age children are accustomed to listening to adults and their directions. For a majority of the transition from childhood to teenage years, listening to “the voices around [us]” is an appropriate way to learn from mistakes and about right from wrong (Oliver 3). As teenagers’ societal norms and friends play a great deal in personality and decisions. Teenagers and their friends are closely knit and bond over doing the activities that are trendy simply because everyone else is doing it. The transition into adulthood is when one begins to know the right and wrong decisions for himself or herself, disregarding the opinions and decisions of others. Though it becomes easier to ignore, parents become a nagging voice in their children’s lives during their adult transition, especially during the college process. putting in their input about where they should go, how far they should go, and even what they should major in. This pressure and prying can affect a whole household similar to how the speaker in this poem seems to be restricted by these voices and opinions that cause the “whole house to tremble” (Oliver 6-7). Throughout life people will try not only to influence the decisions of others but will also try to stop their growth and journey by requesting help. Oliver tries to tell the reader to continue moving forward and ignore the cries for help in order to successfully continue his or her own journey. Though the forces that seem to interfere with journeys the most seem predominantly external, the biggest struggles often come from within. 

At end of the day choosing to go down one’s own path and ignoring the overwhelming opinion of others is possible, but disregarding the voice inside one’s own head is found to be significantly more difficult. An internal struggle is the additional way to look at this poem, more specifically, the mental illness known as schizophrenia. A person with schizophrenia struggles to separate reality from fantasy and separates the association of thought, emotion, and behavior, leading a person with schizophrenia to act inappropriately. People struggling with this may literally feel as if they have “voices around [them] shouting” and “[tugging] at [their] ankles” begging them to mend their own life and help the disease inside of them (Oliver 3-4;8-9). Correlating to the saying “my body is a temple” the house Oliver talks is the subjects body and “the whole house began to tremble,” refers to the voices inside the subject’s head causing their body to feel overcome (Oliver 6-7). Knowing someone who struggled with schizophrenia, their reality often got clouded and they struggled with recognizing themselves amongst the many voices inside of their head. This schizophrenic person’s journey that Oliver could be talking about eventually begins to clear and “there was a new voice which [they] slowly recognized as [their] own” (Oliver 27-29). Schizophrenia is a long and hard struggle and those who deal with it often find themselves trying to truly find themselves, if possible. 

The internal and external struggles people may fight against and manage on their own help them undergo the journey they go through to find themselves, as illustrated in Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey”. Oliver used her poem to connect the readers and show them the importance of choosing their own destination. By having the subject, “us,” reject the external and internal forces, the readers are able to reflect on their lives and decisions made thus far and decide whether they made them with their own desires and interests at heart, or by the influence of others. Being a college level reading gives the readers leeway in changing their majors or taking control over their lives early on in their life. 
