Seven days, seven lines: Thomas W. Morris gives each day of the week exactly one line, and the cramped fit is part of the point. On Monday the speaker performs a small, deliberate act ("I turned an hour glass upside down"), and the rest of the poem lets the sand run. The week brings a sea voyage to "the south west of Japan", a "new town", a lesson about the quran, a gloomy winter day and a baby learning to crawl. The central idea is that time keeps moving whatever we fill it with, whether travel, study, mood or even the arrival of new life. Nothing we do empties the glass.
The poem plays oddly with scale. An hour glass measures an hour, yet on Sunday the sand is "still falling". The poem never explains this. Perhaps the glass is no ordinary one, or the whole week is happening inside a single hour, or the glass has stopped being an object and become a symbol. The same stretching happens elsewhere. Within a few lines the speaker crosses the sea, explores a town and sees the seasons change, because "Friday introduced winter", as if winter were a new acquaintance. Judging by this compression, each "day" seems to stand for something much longer, so that the week works like a miniature life.
The sound pattern supports this. The first five lines rhyme ABABA: down, Japan, town, quran, frown. The Japan/quran pairing depends on how you say the second word, but with a short "a" it chimes, and the rhyme quietly joins a country and a book that belong to very different worlds. The A-rhymes also form a small arc. The poem opens with the glass turned "upside down" and reaches Friday's "frown", and a frown is, after all, a smile turned upside down. The speaker's mood has been flipped just as the glass was.
The rhythm is just as telling. The first five lines are long, around eleven or twelve syllables, with a loose beat that feels like someone reading out diary entries. Each ends on a stressed syllable, so the words land like clock ticks. Then the rhyming couplet shortens and softens. "On Saturday my son started crawling" and "On Sunday the sand was still falling" end on the unstressed "-ing", and the voice trails away instead of closing with a thud. The grammar follows the same path. The earlier verbs are finished actions (turned, sailed, had learned, sat), while the last two lines use ongoing ones (started crawling, was still falling). Things that can be ticked off a list give way to something that cannot be completed.
Notice, too, who is doing the acting. The first five lines are all about "I", the speaker busy and curious, collecting experiences. In line six the subject becomes "my son", and in line seven it becomes "the sand". By the end the speaker has disappeared from the grammar and only time is left acting. The son's crawling is the one personal event reported without any comment on feeling, and that restraint leaves the reader to supply the emotion. A child's growth is a clock we can actually see, moving in the same direction as the sand. The two last words even share a vowel sound, and both movements are low and slow: a baby crawling along the floor, grains falling through glass.
The diction is plain throughout. Almost every word is short and everyday, and there is no decorative imagery apart from the one central object. That plainness is what makes the ending land. The poem offers no moral and no neat conclusion, only a final image of time continuing as normal.
Its value for a student reader lies in how clearly form carries meaning. The days of the week give the poem its skeleton, the rhyme scheme creates a pattern that then relaxes into a couplet, and the changing verbs and subjects quietly shift the poem's focus from one person's busy week to the larger and less controllable movement of time. It is a small poem that rewards a second look, and it ends, like the glass itself, without running out.