By changing the location in accordance with the speaker’s actions and outside influences, Mary Oliver uses location as a recurring figurative device to represent the speaker’s state of mind.   The poem may be pared down to the main idea of the speaker removing herself from something that is unbeneficial to her mental health and seeking out what may help her become who she wants to be.  Each location in the poem is used to demonstrate the different phases in the speaker’s journey.  These phases revolve around the various amounts of involvement of these “voices” in the speaker’s life. (Oliver, 92) There are two locations that are utilized in this way: a house and a road.  Each have their own individual, separate significance to the poem, representing the speaker at different points in her life.  Location propels the poem, moving it along in its narrative and in its meaning.  Its quirky movement from road to house is another telling piece about the poem.  The locations signify the speaker’s internal change by giving the reader an image of her physically moving from one place to another.

The first location mentioned in ‘The Journey’ is a house: “though the whole house began/ to tremble/ and you felt the old tug/ at your ankles.” (Oliver, 92) A house is a thing that is generally expected to be filled with people, be it roommates or family.  This assumption of the involvement of others is confirmed in context of the poem when it speaks about voices “though the voices around you/ kept shouting/ their bad advice.” (92)  These voices, these beings, are requesting the speaker for assistance that she is unable to give them.  “” Mend my life!”/ Each voice cried.” (92)  She is losing the connection that ties her to her own life and her own needs in her attempts to help others that are dependent on her.  During the poem’s reference to the house, everything is in a state of upheaval and emergency.  She is tired of holding everything down for other people and is ready to move into a space calm enough to be able to focus on herself, but the voices continue to prod her.  

The second location Oliver uses is a road.  This departure from the initial location, the house, represents the speaker turning away from the way that she first viewed herself.  She is beginning to develop her sense of being into something that is focused on what she wants for her own life instead of attempting to “save” someone else. (Oliver, 92) The speaker is moving away from viewing herself in the terms of what she can do for other people and inching towards the prospect that she is her own person who may focus on giving aid to her own needs.  The road represents the speaker beginning to uproot from the neediness of others.  Rather than the speaker being grounded in their demands, she begins to move towards what she may want for her own life.  Concentrating on herself provides the basis for a significant theme in the poem of shifting to an inward focus.  The voices fade the longer the speaker is on the road, proving that distance from the house, and so from the people in it, granted the speaker a clearer mind and confirmed that her determination to leave the house was justified.  

The relationship between the locations is an important thing to consider because their significance has such a profound effect on the meaning of the poem.  The speaker’s attitudes to these areas show her outlook on her sense of self.  The choice to make the starting point a house and the end point a road is an interesting one at the hands of Oliver since the expected order would usually be switched: from road to home.  It shows that the speaker is ready to depart from thinking of herself in the way that is most natural for her and make the transition to becoming what she wants to be.  It is easy to associate a house with good memories and thus assume that a house would be the destination rather than the departure point.  This is a significant detail to note because Oliver has written the house to be a place of destitution rather than one of content.  This is not an easy place for the speaker to reside in, and so, with much effort, she leaves.  This references a theme that can be stringed back to the title.  It suggests that the journey that the title references may not only be the one from the house to the road, the one that is detailed in the poem, but may also include what is to come for the speaker if she remains on this road.  An optimistic, yet reasonable based on the direction of the poem, assumption would be a life lived by the speaker unencumbered by the opinions of others and spent discovering what she has to offer herself.

Location is a recurring figurative device in Mary Oliver’s poem ‘The Journey’.  These locations do not necessarily exist in the poem in a physical sense, but exist rather as a representation of the speaker’s state of self-appraisal.  Oliver shows that this is the case by orchestrating the events of the poem to coincide with the shift in the location.  The readers can see that as the speaker moves, the voices that have caused her so much confusion regarding her sense of self begin to dwindle.  While in the house, the speaker cannot clear her head of other people’s voices calling out to her, tugging at her ankles and trying to hold her back.  The house is meant to represent the speaker in terms of other people and what they want from her.  When the speaker makes it to the road, the reader sees a shift in the havoc that filled the first half of the poem.  The voices that have been haunting her start to fade away and her own voice begins to emerge.  The speaker learns how to listen to herself by drawing her attention to her own needs and tuning out what is expected of her from others.
