Mary Oliver

Some Things the World Gave

free verse serene

Some Things the World Gave - meaning Summary

Ordinary Moments as Gifts

The poem gathers brief memories of weather, landscape, human encounter, and refuge. Its speaker treats ordinary moments as gifts: rain revealing city buildings, sunset enlarging the plains, a teacher's gesture, forest silence, and warmth before a storm. Rather than telling a continuous story, the poem suggests that attention and gratitude can make scattered experiences feel like blessings from the world.

Read Complete Analyses

1 Times in the morning early when it rained and the long gray buildings came forward from darkness offering their windows for light. 2 Evenings out there on the plains when sunset donated farms that yearned so far to the west that the world centered there and bowed down. 3 A teacher at a country school walking home past a great marsh where ducks came gliding in -- she saw the boy out hunting and waved. 4 Silence on a hill where the path ended and then the forest below moving in one long whisper as evening touched the leaves. 5 Shelter in winter that day -- a storm coming, but in the lee of an island in a cover with friends -- oh, little bright cup of sun.

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