The Place I Want To Get Back To Mary Oliver Analysis
In our culture, people get wrapped up in the major events in our life, the events that are planned, that are believed to hold our true happiness. Through Mary Oliver’s sobering words and structure in The Place I Want To Get Back To she suggests that true fulfilment is in small spontaneous moments that cannot be repeated, planned, or expected. She believes those are the moments that hold the most gratitude.
By the use of descriptive language to describe the setting, Mary Oliver begins by implying that the poem is taking place in a forest without directly saying so. Oliver uses specific words like “pinewoods” (2) and “darkness” (4) to create the image of a dark forest. She also refers to “deer”, an animal that lives in the forest and “hill” for the reader to imagine a the forest that the speaker is writing about.
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In stanza three Oliver says “they said to each other, okay, / this one is okay,” (9-10) and then in stanza six she also says “I go out to the dunes and look / and look and look” (21-22). Through the poet's choice to use repetition, the central idea of the poem is strengthened in these lines. By the repetition of the words “okay” and “look” the speaker accentuates how much she would love to repeat the moment that the deer came to her, but moments like that cannot be repeated and still hold the same meaning and value.
Another example of Mary Oliver’s strong use of structure is in stanza four saying “on the ground, like that, / so quiet, as if / asleep, or in a dream, / but, anyway harmless” (13-16). In that stanza alone, she was intentional in her usage of commas to illuminate the importance for the reader to slow down and savor the small
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Mary Oliver And The Black Walnut Tree Comparison
1110 Words | 5 Pages(2) The poem was written in 1979, and is told through the view of the persona, which is a young child, most likely Oliver herself who lost their father. This story is told through the setting of her own personal home in Ohio, and with the struggle of dealing with this “Black Walnut Tree” and the decision on whether to cut down and pay off their house mortgage or keep the tree because its symbolism towards their family history. The dramatic situation of this individual poem is found at the end of the poem where the persona is saying, “What my mother and I both know/is that we'd crawl with shame/in the emptiness we'd made/in our own and our fathers' backyard./So the black walnut tree/swings through another year/of sun and leaping winds/of leaves and bounding fruit/and, month after month, the whip-crack of the mortgage.” This is the persona’s way of describing the guilt and difficulties of deciding whether or not to cut this tree down because of the symbolism of the tree; the presence of their deceased father/husband.
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How Does Mary Oliver Use Imagery In Crossing The Swamp
508 Words | 3 PagesMary Oliver’s poem “Crossing the Swamp” shows three different stages in the speaker's life, and uses personification, imagery and metaphor to show how their relationship with the swamp changed overtime. The swamp is personified, and imagery is used to show how frightening the swamp appears before transitioning to the struggle through the swamp and ending with the speaker feeling a sense of renewal after making it so far into the swamp. Finally, metaphor is used to compare the speaker, who has experienced many difficulties to an old tree who has finally begun to grow. Mary Oliver uses the literary element of personification to illustrate the speaker and the swamp’s relationship. She portrays the swamp as alive in lines 4-8 “ the nugget of dense sap, branching/ vines, the dark burred/ faintly belching/ bogs.”
Just As The Calendar Began To Say Summer Mary Oliver Analysis
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