One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice ‑
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do ‑
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver

In this poem, Mary Oliver clearly shows her opinion on the situation of overcoming problems in life, and offers support and understanding through this poem. The poem starts to offer advice after the shift ‘but little by little”, because after this specific shift it mentions how the reader has to be confident in overcoming the situation alone, and that no one can help her. While before this particular shift the reader was going through some hard times. For example it relates these bad voices as the wind prying the foundations of your melancholy, which is not a really a good time. Mary Oliver shows us this clearly by using literary terms like personification for us to imagine or relate to. Not only did the literary terms play role in this poem but the way she wrote it contributed as well (syntax). She never had any stanzas in the poem; she did this because she wanted to add extra emphasis on her shifts. All the shifts also were followed with a literary term like; for example, as the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds (located on line 25) showed an excellent example of imager which, played a very influential role in the poem, because it really justified the shift to make it stand out and to deliver the message or the main idea for everything that followed after the shift. In this specific poem she did it right after both her shifts which gave some extra power to her main idea of how to get over these obstacles. The author also mentioned many different ideas to fix these problems but one of the most powerful line she used was “the only thing you could do ‑determined to save the only life you could save”. This line was the most empowering line in the whole poem in my opinion, because it shows that you must believe in your capabilities to follow through with the accomplishment of overcoming your obstacles in life.