The Morning Glory Also - Analysis

A small joke that lands like loneliness

Bashō’s three lines feel like a shrug, but the shrug is doing real work. The speaker begins with “The morning glory also,” as if adding one more item to a growing list of letdowns. A morning glory is a famously delicate, brief-lived bloom; it opens, it closes, it’s beautiful and then gone. By calling it out as “also” not a friend, the poem suggests the speaker has been disappointed by more than just a flower. The central claim is blunt: even the gentle, seemingly harmless things we want to trust won’t return our need.

Expectation vs. “turns out”

The hinge is packed into the phrase “turns out.” That casual idiom marks a discovery, but it’s the kind of discovery that happens when you’ve already been hoping for something else. The morning glory “turns out / not to be my friend,” which implies the speaker had been treating it like one—projecting companionship onto the natural world. The tone is dry and faintly comic (who expects friendship from a plant?), yet the comedy exposes a real vulnerability: the speaker wants friendship badly enough to try it with a flower.

What the poem refuses to give

There’s a quiet contradiction: the speaker names the bloom with intimacy (“my friend” is personal), but the poem ends by withdrawing that intimacy. Nothing dramatic happens—no storm, no cruelty—just the cool fact of non-reciprocation. The morning glory’s ordinary indifference becomes the point. In three short steps, the poem moves from a tender address to a clean refusal, leaving us with the sting of realizing that beauty isn’t companionship, and attention isn’t always answered.