Morning/The Sun

As the title indicates, the poem takes place in the morning, as the speaker walks through her environs. In the poem, morning is a time of change, when night's darkness is smoothed away by the mighty sun. In the second stanza, the speaker observes the effects of the sun's rising and how the light transforms the "pallid stone wall" and buildings into colorful and vital beings prepared "For luminous tournaments." Morning is also the time of the world's awakening as in lines 14—15 when "windows / open their eyelids." The sun is a symbol of transformative power; however, its daily rising also signals the passage of time, another theme of the poem.

Aging/Wisdom

The speaker laments the inevitable progress of time and its aging effects on human beings in lines 10—13 when she says, "It takes so few hours / To smooth away the night / While our...