Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, April 7th, 2025.

Today's poem is by Mary Oliver, and it's called Breakage. I'll read the poem once, offer a few comments, and then read it one more time.

Breakage. I go down to the edge of the sea,

how everything shines in the morning light,

the cusp of the whelk, the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened blue mussels,

pale, pink and barnacles scarred, and nothing at all whole

or shut, but tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse of little words, thousands of words. First, you figure out what each one means by itself.

The jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

This is an elegant little poem because in some ways it can be a poem about reading a poem, but nothing in the way Oliver crafts the poem insists that you derive that meaning or interpretation from the poem. You don't have to

treat this like an R's Poetica in order to wring out the real essence of the poem. There's a

true story there all the same, but it's also working on that other level. And the story is one of this little ecosystem.

And Oliver is so self-controlled and judicious in her choices,

particularly when she chooses to use simile versus metaphor and vice versa.

So early in the poem, we have in line four, the broken

cupboard of the clam. There's this kind of direct association or correlation. The clam shell

that has been opened or has left a jar by the birds maybe who have been eating the

clam. It is a broken cupboard. It once stored something, but now a door hangs, you know, loose,

cock-eyed off the hinge and the contents are missing. But later on, she compares this whole scene to a schoolhouse of little words.

Now, she could have said it is a schoolhouse of little words, and I think we would have been prepared for that after the strong metaphorical relationship or comparison early in the poem. But she doesn't overtax

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