Mary Oliver

Morning Glories

free verse

Morning Glories - meaning Summary

Beauty Amid Necessary Labor

The poem considers morning glories growing among corn as both weeds and sources of beauty. Their colors and lively forms interrupt the field's practical purpose, while the reaper must gather them with the crop. Oliver contrasts agricultural labor's necessary, repetitive work with the flowers' apparent uselessness, suggesting that what has no economic value may still bring humor, surprise, and beauty into a working life.

Read Complete Analyses

Blue and dark-blue rose and deepest rose white and pink they are everywhere in the diligent cornfield rising and swaying in their reliable finery in the little fling of their bodies their gear and tackle all caught up in the cornstalks. The reaper's story is the story of endless work of work careful and heavy but the reaper cannot separate them out there they are in the story of his life bright random useless year after year taken with the serious tons weeds without value humorous beautiful weeds.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0