Sunday Morning

[1] Bath gown

[2] A kind of parrot with feathers on the top of its head.

[3] Christ’s Crucifixion in Palestine, which Christians commemorate on Sundays.

[4] A woman, in her bath gown, is having “late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” instead of attending church. The feeling of gratification by which she has been indulged has dimmed the holiness of Christ’s sacrifice and her desire to attend church. Nevertheless she feels a pang of conscience. (Stevens in his letters comments that “this is not essentially a woman’s meditation on religion and the meaning of life. It is anybody’s meditation.”)

[5] See 2.

[6] She falls into a religious introspection as if everything around her such as “pungent oranges and bright green wings” seems to be prepared for the Mass. Then later, in her contemplation they seem to be some figures in a “procession of the dead”.

[7] The woman seems to be surrounded by “wide water” across which the already-mentioned figures are winding. “without sound” signifies silence as well as her dreaming of “the dead”.

[8] As she plunges more deeply into her contemplations, the woman seems to accompany the procession by “her dreaming feet” to Palestine, the “Dominion of the blood and sepulchre”.

[9] Stanza two begins with some rhetorical questions posed by an outside narrator. The woman’s haphazard way of questioning points out her agitated mind, her internal conflict and plague conscience caused by the encroachment of the procession. The dead mentioned in the previous stanza.   

[10] The speaker seeks “divinity” in “comforts of sun” rather than “silent shadows and dreams” or else in “pungent fruit and bright green wings”, the things by which the woman is surrounded in the first stanza. They all give the impression of being down-to-earth rather than being celestial or ethereal, and they are all apt “to be cherished like the thought of heaven”. The speaker, however, questions why the woman should be distracted from her enjoyment of life by a religion that is available “Only in silent shadows and in dreams.” The narrator appears to advocate paganism.

[11] This is the final answer to all her questions.

[12] Some positive and negative feelings or “All pleasures and all pains” caused by nature can be treasured as heaven.

[13] At last the speaker comes to this realisation that all these contemplations have been “destined for her soul,” which leaves both the woman and the reader dejected.

[14] Ruler of the gods in Roman myths. He used to come to earth and flirt amongst earthly women.

[15] Here Jove with his “inhuman birth” is compared to Jesus. But Jove himself, a magnificent king, descended to earth because there in the sky was no room for his “large mannered motions,” and no one appreciated “his mythy mind.” The very word “mythy” is an understatement for “mythical,” emphasizing people’s disregard and contempt for Jove’s unearthly and intangible conduct.

[16] The word “muttering” can heighten the implication that Jove was a dissatisfied, complaining sky king who liked the earth and earthy people or women better.

[17] Female deers. This word sheds light on the assumption that Jove tend to have sexual relationships with earthly women.

[18] An allusion to the birth of Jesus by Virgin Mary.

[19] The star over Bethlehem that marked Jesus’ birth.

[20] Stanza three discusses a religious progression over time. A history of divinity is traced in this stanza. At first, people believed in Jove as a primitive god. Then, commingling of human blood with heaven brought about the birth of Jesus.

[21]. Moving from Greece to Palestine, from polytheism of Roman gods to monotheism of Christian God, she asks whether our blood will fail: “Shall our blood fail?” Will we leave the Christian God as we left Jove?

[22] When “the earth seem[s] all of paradise,” “the sky will be much friendlier” than “this diving and indifferent blue.” In other words, when the earth is discerned as heaven, the sky also looks so intimate that it comes to endure our labour and pain, instead of remaining such alienated and detached grandeur.

[23] The speaker finally concludes that divinity can merely lie in her responses to the physical world, which is the only kind of heaven she will know.

[24] She is content with the remembrance of satisfactions of nature, and also worried about afterlife.

[25] The narrator responds that paradise by whose prophecy our mind is obsessed does not exist any longer. Heaven is just an old illusion and fantasy; it is by no means a “golden underground,” nor a melodious isle…it is merely the woman’s remembrance of the birds or “her desire for June and evening”… The narrator shatters the woman’s illusion of Heaven and by this, prepares the ground for his assertion of the death of Jesus in the last stanza.

[26] Definite elimination which indicates inevitability of death.

[27] The woman seeks an immortal happiness. But this time, her worries are answered with the idea that “Death is the mother of beauty.” Although death “makes the willow shiver in the sun” and “strews the leaves of sure obliteration in our paths,” “she” has appeared to be the only fulfiller of our dreams and desires, and this fulfillment is dependent on its transitory nature. Death and desire are closely related to one another. The deathless fulfillment of paradise is therefore impossible. In this way, death can comfort the woman.

[28] Stevens about “disregarded plate” remarks that “plate is used in the sense of so-called family plate. “Disregarded” refers to the disuse into which things fall and that have been possessed for a long time. I mean, therefore, that death releases and renews. What the old have come to disregard, the young inherit and make use of.”

[29] Dead maidens used to sit gazing on the grass which they used to tread, and which is now withdrawn from their feet. Stevens in his letters about this part states that: “A new generation of boys will inherit the plate of the old and make use of it to tempt a new generation of maidens.”

[30] The narrator in this stanza criticises the “unchanging” nature of paradise and looks upon it as monotonous by mocking at the “ripe fruit [which] will never fall”, and admires “…our perishing earth, / With rivers like our own that seek for seas…”. Therefore the imperishable paradise is blemished.

[31] The repetition of “Death is the Mother of beauty” presents death as a perfection and fulfillment to be longed for fervently.

[32] The whole stanza explores the idea that the significance of beauty is attributed to the transience of the world. Death is the cause of all beauty and all ugliness, all pleasure and all pain, all life.

[33] A wild party with a lot of eating, drinking and sexual activity. It pictures a pagan scene.    

[34] The scene pictures the ancient worship of sun as a god which is a humanly created god.

[35] About the chant of these men, boisterous in devotion to their “savage source”, Stevens states that: “It is the belief and not the god that counts”.

[36] The seventh stanza develops the idea of religious succession introduced in the third stanza by giving a pre-Christian depiction of ancient worship of sun as a god. Here, the blood of the “supple and turbulent”, chanting men returns to the sky in a process similar to the commingling of human blood with the blood of heaven in the third stanza.

[37] Angels of highest rank

[38] “The windy lake,” “ The trees,” and “echoing hills” intermingling with the voice of chanting men while worshiping the sun might suggest that human is a part of nature. The participation of these men in their environment, in “the windy lake wherein their lord delights”, is not merely mystical; it is concrete as well. These images elaborate the idea that “Divinity must live within herself”; thus, she only needs to grasp it.

[39] The men celebrate a transitory world, knowing that their rapport with the “summer morn” will finally perish.

[40] “Life is as fugitive as dew upon the feet of men dancing in dew. Men do not either come from any direction or disappear in any direction. Life is as meaningless as dew.” (Steven’s Letters)

[41] Jesus is dead, and his tomb in Palestine is no longer a “porch of spirits” remaining after the body is dead. It is merely a grave, with a bunch of bones, like anybody else’s grave.

[42] We all live in a perpetual, long-lasting cycle from which we are unable, as individuals, to escape.

[43] The pigeons suggest a state of existence which is isolated from the supernatural (“isolation of the sky”) and also ambiguous in the meaning of its destiny as are the undulations as they sink to darkness, but with extended wings, as if in having agreement with that destiny.

[44] “[I]sland solitude”, “isolation of the sky” and images of evening, downward motion, and  the darkness function to end “Sunday Morning” and conclude the rejection of the Christian concept of divinity. The “green freedom of a cockatoo” at the beginning of the poem has been transformed into the “Ambiguous undulations” of pigeons “as they sink, / Downward to darkness.”

[45] This final section presents images conveying what the poet regards as proper celebrations of the bonds between humans and the natural world. Here, the woman hears a voice that denies the divinity of Jesus, and the poem ends with the poet’s final evocation of the transitory beauties of the world.

ANALYSIS

 “Sunday Morning”, written at the beginning of Stevens’s career, is considered as one of his best-known poems. As to the form, “Sunday Morning” consists of eight self-contained, fifteen-line stanzas, written in Wallace Stevens’s customary version of blank verse. The basic line in all Stevens’s long poems is a solemn and somewhat heavy blank verse, employing iambic pentameter and making use of echoing sounds rather than end- rhymes. At several points in the poem, the verse has a majestic quality and an intensity that are used to emphasize the strength of the poem’s message. In the first stanza, for example, “Complacencies,” “Coffee,” “cockatoo,” “catastrophe”… “water lights,” “Winding across wide water without sound,” or “Seem things in some procession of the dead,”(My blodings). In the second stanza successive lines begin with the words “Passion,” “Grievings,” “Elations,” and “Emotions.” This is especially the case in the final seven lines of the poem, where deer, the whistling cry of quail, and the sweetness of ripening berries represent the attractions of the natural world.

“Sunday Morning” makes much use of assertions and rhetorical questions that are designed to question and suspect the validity of traditional religious belief. The poem, however, presents its message primarily through imagery, much of it evoking bright colours, movement, and vivid tastes and smells to provide a contrast to dimness and illusiveness of spiritual appeals. Death, as it brings “sure obliteration,” is an active and positive force, images through verbs such as “strews,” and “stray impassioned.” Passion and other strong emotions are possible only because one knows that life is only temporary. The description of a human ritual in the seventh stanza makes use of energetic images: “Supple and turbulent,” “boisterous,” “savage.”

On the other hand, in an imagined paradise, there is “no change of death,” but only rivers that never reach the sea, ripe fruit never falls from the trees; the images associated with religion and dreams of an afterlife are sinister and lifeless: “haunt of prophesy” and “old chimera of the grave.”

Stevens’s fondness for obscure words and unusual phrasings is less marked in “Sunday Morning” than many of his other poems, but it is evident in such words as “chimera” or “mythy,” in the opening phrase (“Complacencies of the peignoir”), and in the last stanza: “Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, / Of that wide water, inescapable.” In some places, he deliberately uses archaic words and phrases to suggest that religious belief is out of date: “such requital to desire,” or “Neither the golden underground, not isle / Melodious, where spirits gat them home.”

There are few similes in the poem; most of the metaphors are subtle, such as the use of “measures” in the second stanza to suggest both musical divisions and ways of measuring. Stevens makes considerable use of personification, not only by ironically imaging death as an active force, but also by giving life to emotions such as sorrow and passion.

Stevens’s life-long conviction that poetry and poets must take the place of religion and priests to provide form and meaning for human life is quite conspicuous in this poem as it is a remarkably philosophical poem, and therefore, prepares a good ground for some basic themes that are well-developed in his Harmonium as well as “Sunday Morning”.

The most important of these themes is the idea that human perception of beauty requires the recognition that everything earthly is temporary. Everyone will die, everything will change; permanence is merely an illusion. Christianity or any other religion promising permanence is false because it envisions a paradise that is something like our earth but without the inherent changes in earth’s life and its circumstances. However, religious emotion is not suppressed. It is only given a new form by worshiping nature by its employment of vivid colours, kinetic imagery and romantic evocation of the natural world.

The poem takes the form of a meditation or philosophical dialogue between the central character, a woman on a quest to find spiritual fulfillment whose mind is the scene, and the voice of the poet, who attempts to resolve her questions during her journey. The poem could also be regarded as a conversation between self and soul, between the social self that feels pressured to conform to traditional religious doctrines and the internal self that desires a more natural connection with the world. Hence a conflict between the secularism and the religiosity.

Zohreh Exiri