Mary Oliver

I immediately felt a connection to the poem I was assigned when I saw that the author was Mary Oliver. I have been introduced to her poems before, specifically the Wild Geese poem which i have come to love. The second connection i felt to this poem was in the first line: 'I go down to the edge of the sea.' Personally, i feel a deep connection to water; hence me deciding to surround myself with the water by choosing Eckerd College. And when my eyes slipped under the word 'sea' and onto 'morning light' I noticed my third connection to Breakage. As a child, i would end my prayers with the following:
"And please wake us all with the morning light. Amen."
Without even reading half of the poem, i already felt a strong bond to it through these three seemingly unrelated personal references.
Oliver starts her poem by mentioning the morning light shining and at the end of the poem she concludes with the moonlight. Naturally, we would assume that the poem's conclusion would coincide with the end of the poem and therefore with the moonlight. But i don't think that is the case with this poem. Oliver is really ending the poem at the beginning, with everything gleaming in the morning light. She has worked all night to 'figure out what each one means by itself' and arrives at her conclusion in the morning light. It is only then that she can see the all of the shells beauty; once she has strung together the meaning of each individual 'broken' shell to get to the 'whole story.' Therefore Breakage needs to be read through at least twice to get its meaning.
The poem's progression is a metaphor for life. In Oliver's opinion, we need to understand each broken or miserable event in our lives before we can step back, put all of the events together and see the big picture. Before gaining perspective, we need to analyze and understand each event and its meaning. I can't say i actually agree with this philosophy. With the morning light, we can see how each of these broken pieces of ourselves are actually glorious.
When she writes that 'nothing at all whole or shut' this means that we can't leave an event un-analyzed, no matter how painful. Instead, everything is 'tattered, split, dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks'- all the events are raw. The gulls dropping the shell/animal onto the rock is symbolic of our life events being completely opened and exposed. 'It's like a schoolhouse' in the sense that we are learning from each of these events.
We can appreciate the beauty ('everything shines in the morning light') and be grateful for it all once we have learned from each event and then stepped back to get a full perspective.