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. …show more content…
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