The Morning-Glory by Maria Lowell
"The Morning-Glory" by Maria Lowell is a lyric elegy mourning the death of a beloved young child, rendered through the sustained metaphor of the morning-glory flower. The poem opens with a tender domestic scene in which the family crowns their infant daughter's head with morning-glory blossoms, and in doing so discover a name that perfectly captures her nature. The child's face, radiant and full of vitality, seems to outshine even the flower itself, making the blossom merely a pale emblem of the living girl it adorns. The nickname takes on daily meaning as the child grows into her name literally and figuratively. Each morning she rises with the light, smiling from behind her cradle bars just as the morning-glory opens its petals to greet the dawn. Lowell draws the parallel with careful tenderness, noting that the flower's blue cups, lovely as they are, cannot rival the child's eyes brimming with sleep, and that the plant's clinging tendrils are no match for the child's outstretched arms, which draw every heart instinctively toward her. The poem then dwells briefly on the spiritual significance the parents had attached to the child's arrival. She had come as the morning-glory comes, as a crowning gift that perfects love's fullest hour, a living expression of feelings too deep to articulate directly, just as a dew-drop holds and returns the full light of the sun in miniature. The child had seemed to concentrate and reflect back the love surrounding her. The poem's emotional center shifts with terrible swiftness. The parents had never imagined that their morning-glory, like its floral namesake, would wither before the day was out. The shock is addressed directly to God, an almost involuntary cry of disbelief as the parents confront what they could not have prepared themselves to face: the child lying cold, still, and dead. The image of the morning-glory's cup closing and shriveling at day's end becomes a devastating analogy for a life that lasted only its brief opening hours. In the closing movement the poem turns from grief toward seasonal renewal and then beyond it. Spring returns and the morning-glory vines begin again their annual ascent, their heart-shaped leaves pushing up from the ground, renewing what winter destroyed. But the human child cannot renew herself by the same earthly law. The earth's air is too cold, its dews too harsh to sustain so delicate a spirit. The parents' eyes search the green landscape and find nothing. Yet the poem does not end in pure desolation. Lowell reaches toward consolation in the image of Paradise, where the family is confident they will see their morning-glory again, her beauty restored and surpassing, twining now not around a trellis but around the knee of Christ himself. The closing vision transforms the domestic tenderness of the opening, the child reaching out her arms to those who love her, into a heavenly counterpart, the child clinging in perfect safety to divine love. The poem as a whole moves with quiet inevitability from joy to grief to tentative hope, using its central metaphor consistently and without strain. The morning-glory serves simultaneously as a term of endearment, an image of brief and brilliant beauty, a symbol of daily renewal, and finally a figure for the transience that applies to flowers and children alike, save that faith insists a child's glory does not simply close and rot but is preserved in a light beyond the earthly day.
By Maria Lowell · First published 1891 · Genre: Elegy, Lyric Poetry, Religious Poetry · 424 words
First lines
We wreathed about our darling's head the morning-glory bright; / Her little face looked out beneath, so full of life and light, / So lit as with a sunrise, that we could only say
She is the morning-glory bright, and her poor types are they.
What this Textopian page supports
The Morning-Glory is listed on Textopian as a poem by Maria Lowell, dated 1891 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Maria Lowell
- Date: 1891 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Elegy, Lyric Poetry, Religious Poetry, Domestic Poetry, Sentimental Poetry
- Length: 424 words
- Structure: 1 section, 10 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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- Work identity for The Morning-Glory by Maria Lowell
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Elegy — The poem is a lament for a deceased child, following the traditional elegy form with expressions of grief, loss, and eventual consolation through spiritual faith.
- Lyric Poetry — The work employs musical language, emotional intensity, and personal reflection characteristic of lyric verse, focusing on the speaker's inner feelings rather than narrative events.
- Religious Poetry — The poem concludes with Christian consolation, invoking God and Paradise as sources of comfort for the bereaved, reflecting Victorian spiritual themes.
- Domestic Poetry — The poem centers on family life, childhood, and parental love, common subjects in 19th-century domestic poetry, particularly among female poets.
Tags
grief · bereavement · death · loss · mourning · maternal love · sorrow · elegy · nature symbolism · flowers · transience · mortality