Mary Oliver’s, Morning Glories

Note On Copyrights

I purchased and now own Mary Oliver’s book of poems and essays titled Blue Iris. However, it doesn’t mean I have the right to publish “Morning Glories” full poem here. After all, I own this book, not the rights. It is a shame that I can’t post the full poem here for my poetry analysis since it is such a beautiful poem, but I certainly understand why we have copyright laws. You can however read the poem in full at Poetry Foundation, or better yet purchase her book Blue Iris from Beacon Press website (I try to recommend sites other than Amazon to help get the money to the actual artists or their estates, but you can find it on Amazon too, of course) or better yet- better yet, go visit a local bookstore and pick it up.

The Shape of the Poem

Mary Oliver’s poem, “Morning Glories,” has seven stanzas with three lines in each stanza. Each line is enjambed and staggered as if the poem is winding upward. There are two periods in the poem. The first is in stanza four line one after the word cornstalks. The second is in stanza seven line three (also the last line of the poem), after the word weeds. There is no rhyme scheme. Although Mary Oliver’s poem is written in one continuous flow, there are two parts to it. The first part describes the morning glories tangling up in the cornstalks. The second part is the story of the reaper and his yearly struggle with these little trumpet flowers.

How I Analyzed this Poem

I am not a poetry scholar. I did take a few years of poetry classes, but sometimes, the study of poetry escaped me, especially when it came to the math of it. I mean the iambic pentameter and other metric lines. Admittedly, there are also many poems that are lost on me. While I was a student in both high school and college, there were days I just felt like the stupid one in the class because it seemed like everyone but me got the poem. I am currently reading Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” which I’ve been doing for over ten years, and there is so much lost in the translation of time. Yet, that doesn’t mean I can’t try to analyze a poem or offer up some insight into what I glean from a work of poetry. I do welcome any input that you may want to add that I will definitely have missed. Please feel free to leave a comment.

I, of course, started by reading the poem. In the first read, I allowed myself to simply enjoy the words as they were on the page. I thought about what stood out to me the most. Sometimes, when reading a poem, I will have this blank feeling as if nothing hit me or stood out. This isn’t to say a poem is bad. It would be easy and lazy for me to pass it off as a bad poem. Generally, the reason I have that blank moment is because it takes time for my brain to relax and adjust to the shape and form of the language. This means I will have to read the poem two or three times before I can start really breaking it down and work towards the inner kernels. There are times when a poem hits me right away, and I am able to start working into it sooner. Mary Oliver’s “Morning Glories” is one of those poems. On the first read, I was there walking in the field of corn observing the flowers spiraling up the stalks and toward the sun. I felt a peaceful calm. Yet, immediately, there were a few questions that popped up into my mind that I needed to find the answers to in order to get more out of the poem. For example, I needed to look up morning glories. I’m not good with flowers and their names, so the very first thing was to find this flower and learn about it. I had to look up reaper, too. I knew the grim reaper was death, and I figured it had to do with farming because of the scythe in the image of the grim reaper, but I knew there was more to the word. I looked up gear and tackle. I had a feeling these were tools for fishing, but why would she choose fishing equipment and tools to describe flowers? What was the metaphor? I asked myself why she wrote the poem in the staggered three like form. Once I gathered my bits of information, I read the poem again with new knowledge, and like a flower in the morning light, the poem opened up to me.

The First Half

Morning Glories begins with colors: blue, dark-blue, rose, deepest rose, white, pink. I’m not very good with the names of flowers, so I had to look up morning glories, and it is no surprise that these little trumpet shaped flowers come in the colors that Mary Oliver opens her poem with. Right away, she tells us that it is the colors that are the first thing she sees. Therefore, in the poem, they are the first things that we see, too.

are everywhere in the diligent
        cornfield rising and swaying
                in their reliable

finery in the little
         fling of their bodies their
                  gear and tackle

I love how she describes these little morning flowers like the fisherman coming out early in the morning to capture the cornstalks using their thin vines like gear and tackle. Yet, they are such light and pretty flowers that their petals are their finery, and their time is reliable. Morning glories get their name (Ipomea) because they open in the morning sun but close up after the noon sun passes. They remain closed until the next morning. Reliable and diligent.

When doing research on morning glories I came across a blog post titled Corn Stalks and Morning Glories. In the post there are photographs of morning glories twining their way around the cornstalks just as Mary Oliver’s poem describes.

The Second Half

Morning glories are considered invasive in some areas, and some people even consider them to be weeds. They have a high tolerance for dry soils and can self seed, so with each plow, the seed pods get buried into the earth to bloom again the following year. In Mary Oliver’s poem, she writes, “The reaper’s story is the story/of endless work.” The reaper is a human; the farmer or the farmhand, or the reaper is the harvester machine, but the reaper is also death. It doesn’t matter how hard the reaper works to remove the flowers from the cornstalks or how he tries to kill the flowers every year the morning glories return.

are in the story of his life
        bright random useless
               year after year

Every year, the reaper gathers the “serious tons” the corn with the “weeds without value” annually with the same diligence and reliability as the morning glories. They can not be separated, the morning glories, the cornstalks, the soil, and the reaper because they share the same story.

I’ve worked over the final stanza in my mind and haven’t reached a conclusion that fully satisfies me. “Weeds without value humorous/beautiful weeds.” The word humorous has hung me up many times. Is she saying the reaper finds this yearly work to be humorous, or is it humorous to the flowers? Or, is it the poet the viewer and us the readers that find the repetitive act to be amusing?

A Natural Nature Poet

What drew me to Mary Oliver in the first place, and what keeps me coming back to her is her ability to capture nature so clearly. I mentioned in a previous post, and it bears repeating, my introduction to her was through Mary Oliver’s most famous poem or one of her most famous poems, “The Summer Day.” I was overawed with her description of the grasshopper eating in her hand. I couldn’t believe the detailed observation she had made watching the grasshopper, a field researcher’s observation yet taken down and shared in a poetic form. I wanted to know how to write like her. I don’t have many poets to compare her to, but I feel the Mary Oliver has a distinct and astute ability to capture nature onto a page into a poem and then bring that nature to us. The natural world was her muse, and we, the readers, have reaped the reward. We are the reapers, and she is the morning glory, careful, diligent, and serious with her words.