By Mary Oliver, 2004
The poem starts off with a lot of pessimistic ideas from a third party, as the poem describes them as crawling through a desert on their knees. It then goes on to say how there is a lot more to the world than being upset in a way and to explore the possibilities given to us.
I feel that the poem was a representation of depression, as in the beginning of the poem, the person that the messages were directed to was seemingly going through a rougher patch in life and they couldn’t see the way out, but towards the end of the poem, the ‘narrator’ shows many different ways to look past the tough spot that the third party is in and move on with life.