Otherwise- Jane Kenyon post by Jacinda Evans

This poem is quite simple. Kenyon describes the basic daily routine she goes through from waking up and eating breakfast to walking the dog and finally returning back to bed for the next day. In this poem she constantly states “it might have been otherwise”, as if she has other plans of doing something else. She writes in the first person, using I, making the poem seem extremely person. She also writes the events of her day in chronological order, and uses a lot of detail. The structure of the poem is just as simple as the poem itself. The poem has no specific design to it.
While reading this poem I discovered two interpretations. The first literal one I noticed was that the speaker has no excitement in her life. She is stuck in a routine that she can not escape. At the end of the poem, she states “But one day I know it will be otherwise”, meaning that she is going to break this and do something different.
The second interpretation I received was that the speaker had a condition where she loses her memory. And basically since she does not remember what she did, she assumes that she did the normal thing, that’s why she says “it might have been otherwise”. For instance, she mentions what she ate for breakfast and says it might have been otherwise. Since she cannot remember what she ate, she says what she would have eaten. So whenever she cannot remember something, she imagines what would have been an makes that what she did that day.