"Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good"
About this Quote
Larcom sneaks a tough moral argument into a gentle greenhouse image. The plant metaphor isn’t just prettifying hardship; it’s a way of refusing the clean, Instagrammable narrative of “growth” as a direct reward for pain. A plant “does not know” whether showers or sunshine mattered more, and that ignorance is the point: development happens beneath awareness, through accumulation, not epiphany. By making the speaker unsure, Larcom sidesteps the self-congratulatory tone that often clings to stories of adversity. She’s not performing resilience; she’s admitting the limits of autobiography.
The subtext is quietly radical for a 19th-century poet whose life intersected with early industrial labor (Larcom worked in Lowell’s mills before becoming an educator and writer). In that world, “hard things” could mean grinding necessity, not character-building spice. The line’s restraint reads like a refusal to romanticize suffering while still acknowledging its formative force. “Pleasant things” aren’t dismissed as frivolous; they are presented as equally structural. That balance pushes against a culture - then and now - that treats deprivation as authenticity and comfort as moral weakness.
The sentence also works rhetorically because it collapses the binary it sets up. “Showers and sunshine” aren’t opposites so much as partners in the same ecosystem. Larcom’s intent feels less like advice than calibration: a reminder that becoming oneself is often an untrackable mix of bruises and blessings, and that the ledger we keep in hindsight is usually fiction.
The subtext is quietly radical for a 19th-century poet whose life intersected with early industrial labor (Larcom worked in Lowell’s mills before becoming an educator and writer). In that world, “hard things” could mean grinding necessity, not character-building spice. The line’s restraint reads like a refusal to romanticize suffering while still acknowledging its formative force. “Pleasant things” aren’t dismissed as frivolous; they are presented as equally structural. That balance pushes against a culture - then and now - that treats deprivation as authenticity and comfort as moral weakness.
The sentence also works rhetorically because it collapses the binary it sets up. “Showers and sunshine” aren’t opposites so much as partners in the same ecosystem. Larcom’s intent feels less like advice than calibration: a reminder that becoming oneself is often an untrackable mix of bruises and blessings, and that the ledger we keep in hindsight is usually fiction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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