“ One day you finally knew what you had to do…”(Oliver 91). This is where Mary Oliver’s story began. The poem “The Journey” is showing people who she wants to be in her life and the obstacles she is overcoming to get what she wants in order to be happy. Oliver seems to be always coming back to “the voices” she hears throughout her life. The concept she is trying to portray in this poem is to look beyond the negative voices and thoughts that she has always been influenced by. She shows this by using specific words and having a specific tone throughout the poem. This poem is using the message of voices internally and externally which contribute to Mary Oliver’s journey of finding herself. With hearing all of the negative voices coming from inside her head as well as outside, she is determined to find happiness with herself and use the negative voices to, in the end, make her stronger and happier than ever. 

At the beginning of her poem, she is starting to show an interest in her feelings and she realizes the voices are slowly starting to have an affect on her mental state and seem to be pulling her down from hearing all of these negative voices in her head. For example, in “The Journey”, Oliver states, “though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-“(Oliver 91). In those lines, Oliver is talking about the impact that the external voices are having on her, which are coming from her family, friends and society and the impact those external voices are having on her self esteem. The specific words Oliver uses is a helpful indicator to show how she is feeling about all the negative thoughts she is hearing from the outside voices. Words like tremble, bad, and shouting have all had a negative impact on Oliver and affected her judgment on making decisions she thought would be good for her, or a decision she thought would make her happy again like she use to be. These external voices she is constantly hearing seem to have taken over her thought train and taken away her very own voice, which she cannot even hear anymore due to the overwhelming amount of voices she hears day to day from other people.   

Oliver has been hearing these voices throughout the entire poem, but they seem to be coming from her head, as well as outside of her head. She states “and you felt the old tug at your ankles”(Oliver 91). This is a great quote to show that, she does not mean someone was literally pulling and tugging at her feet, but she is in fact trying to explain the pressure she feels from the voices that are coming from inside her head that have formed due to so many different voices coming at her all the time. The voices that seem to be coming from her own head are thoughts as if she is trapped, and most of all the thoughts want her to be free and happy. For example,“ Mend my life!” (Oliver 91). The fact that these are the voices that are coming from the inside, seems like she is really looking to find a way to get away from all the negative thoughts she is having and or hearing from both herself and from people. With all the voices coming from her own head, she is jumbled and confused. She does not know what to do or think at this point.  Although Oliver knows what will make her happy, she cannot seem to find a way to get rid of the negativity that seems to always be running through. She knows that when she is able to be confident with her out thoughts, that will create positive internal voices and those positive voices will one day make her happy again. 

Oliver has all of these voices running through her head. Whether they are her own or they are coming from the outside of her head, for example, her family, friends, and society.  From the beginning, Oliver does not know who she is, and so many people have such a large influence on her that she starts to convince herself that she might as well start to think negative about all of the decisions she is making. In the middle of it, she realizes, that maybe she does have a voice, and that maybe she can start to think positive thoughts about the decisions she is making without having to worry about what the external voices are saying to her. For example, Oliver writes “But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations,” (Oliver 91). She begins to have courage at this point of the poem and is finding that she knows what she had to do to ignore all of the negative and discouraging voices and start listening to the positive things. She knows that there are going to be challenges with this, just like there were in the beginning and that is why is was in the situation she was in at first, but now she is willing to do what it takes no matter what is in her way trying to stop her. At this point, she is worrying about the internal voices because she has control of those voices, while executing the external voices due to the fact that she has no control over what other people are saying to her. 

In conclusion, Mary Oliver writes a poem that shows how much a person can change and find him or herself if they try hard enough and do not let anything get in the way, even if it is a close friend or family member that voices their negative thoughts or opinions. In this poem one of the biggest negative voices she was listening to was her own voice. Becoming confident and determined is a difficult thing to do, especially in her case because the internal voices seemed to be taking over her mind and causing her to not be able to focus on anything positive about herself. After she started to see some good in herself, she suddenly had a change of heart and decided to take action and stop listening to the bad voices that had influenced her life for some time now. She knew what she had to do and she did it. Oliver wrote at the end of her poem “determined to do the only thing you could do- determined to save the only life you could save” (Oliver 91).  She saw that there was nobody who she could do anything for and vice versa. There was the only person who could make herself truly happy and confident, and that was herself. She was a completely different person by the end of the poem and was not going to go back to listen to the negative internal or external voices she had been listening to her whole life. 
