Most people, at some point in their life, hit a wall of negativity. Mary Oliver, in her poem, “The Journey,” emphasizes the trouble negativity has in the accomplishment of her goal, and later on how she pushes through it. Oliver’s purpose of writing this poem is to motivate those who may not have the overall strength to conquer all the hardship that is against them. She adopts an ardent tone in order to attract an audience who may be lost within life and to pull them into her writing. Oliver used emotion, voice, and ethos in order to strengthen her overall message of overcoming negativity. Oliver begins her poem by using the rhetorical strategy of emotion. Emotion is a very simple, yet complex thing, that everyone has the ability to relate to. She appeals to the audience through emotion by saying that although “the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice” (Oliver) and “the whole house began to tremble” (Oliver) she kept …show more content…
She begins with a cynical voice stating, “kept shouting their bad advice” (Oliver), in order to widen the eyes of the audience. She does this to show that the other voices are driven by their own self-interest. Their guidance is useless in her journey. Halfway through the poem she switches to an optimistic voice by saying “as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds” (Oliver). This line shows hope and a vision of a positive future. This imagery represents how the cynical voices were blocking all that was good within her life, the stars representing the good. As she pushed through the clouding voices, the chance for a brighter future had become clearer. Oliver uses the voices as a rhetorical strategy in order to show how she felt within that certain situation. The different uses of voice from Mary Oliver not only string the entire poem together. It also intensifies the meaning of the text, allowing a deeper connection between reader and