The Journey

The central theme of “The Journey” is discovering your intended path by listening to your inner wisdom, then traveling along this path, facing obstacles and fighting the urge to turn back. Although the speaker uses past tense, the reflection highlights how internal knowledge can help people as they progress along a newly chosen path. In the poem, “you” learned to hear your own voice and be alone with yourself, and the journey to save yourself was something you were capable of and intended to do. Similarly, all people can persevere along a new path if they can ignore outside influence and listen to their own intuition.

Oliver introduces the importance of internal knowledge in the first line, repeating the word “knew” (Lines 1, 13). The impetus of the journey described in the poem is the knowledge that focusing on oneself is crucial. It takes time to arrive at this knowledge: “One day you finally knew” (Line 1). The temporal adverb “finally” indicates that people look for this type of knowledge for long periods of time before ultimately comprehending their inner truth. In the poem, this revelation comes after many days of being unable to understand the journey. After addressing the distractions come from others, Oliver reiterates: “You knew what you had to do” (Line 13).