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Wallace Stevens
Sunday Morning (1915)
I
Complacencies of the peignor, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon the rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. She dreams a little, and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among water-lights. The pungent oranges and bright, green wings Seem things in some procession of the dead, Winding across wide water, without sound. The day is like wide water, without sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul.
III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind. He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, would move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, in a star. Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be The blood of paradise? And shall the earth Seem all of paradise that we shall know? The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next in glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” There is not any haunt of prophesy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel The need of some imperishable bliss.” Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Although she strews the leaves Of sure obliteration on our paths, The path sick sorrow took, the many paths Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
ANALYSIS
I
On Sunday morning, rather than attending church, an affluent woman stays home luxuriating in the sun with late coffee and oranges. She is not even dressed, exposed as the poem exposes her psychologically. Like the cockatoo on the rug she is a free spirit, an exotic in her community. The cockatoo also connotes a preening indulgence and pride. At the same time the repetition of the modifier “green” emphasizes that her desire for freedom imaged in “green wings” is natural and conducive to growth. Birds are a common metaphor of the spirit, such as the parrot and the mockingbird in cages at the beginning of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). Here the uncaged cockatoo evokes the unconventional attitude and subsequent awakening of this woman protagonist, initiating a bird motif in the poem.
Her sensory pleasures “mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice” as she avoids thinking. Instead she “dreams a little,” using her imagination, the only means of transcendence in the world of Stevens. Her complacent escapism is disturbed by “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe”—the crucifixion of Christ. The feeling is creepy, like a calm on water darkening as it moves into light. The feeling of death spoils her pleasure. For now the oranges and the bird are reduced to things that will die. The feeling of a silent emptiness enlarges as it winds across “wide water.”
Until the feeling is like “the day”—subsuming time as well as space. The repetition of “wide water, without sound” enlarges the image into a metaphor of the infinite universe, empty of all meaning except beauty and death. She can no longer resist thinking of her religion, paradoxically facing reality by using her imagination. Palestine is “silent” to her, like death, and the stanza ends not with the thought of resurrection but at the tomb of Christ, an image to which she returns in the last stanza, with resignation rather than dread. II
The poem becomes an inner dialogue when she asks herself why she should remain faithful to a dead religion. She has already lost her faith in immortality and the poem dramatizes her rejection of Christianity altogether. Since she is mortal, what does the alleged divinity of Christ matter? Why not cherish the sensory pleasures of life instead of clinging to a myth? The answer is without quotation marks, indicating that it comes from inside her: Divinity must live within herself.
This is Existentialism, the belief that the universe is meaningless and that we must create our own meaning in life. The poem does not present an argument, it consists of assertions made in response to her questions and is a dialogue between parts of her psyche—a psychological allegory. Stevens may have thought of the two contending parts as, in his terms throughout his poetry, the “mind of winter” and the “mind of summer”: the cold objective masculine side that sees “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” and the warm feminine side that desires and dreams—the insurance executive and the poet.
As a realist with a “mind of winter” Stevens rejected transcendentalism of any kind, yet his assertion that “divinity” must live within is pantheistic, but only in the limited sense of what he called a “supreme fiction.” His examples of divinity invest Nature with a spiritual value that redeems life from meaningless absurdity, offering a secular salvation based on his perception of Reality. Since his passionate periodic sentence exalts “All pleasures and all pains” Stevens cannot be reduced to a mere hedonist. He affirms more than the pursuit of pleasure, he embraces all of life. Within the limitations of his worldview he is holistic. Though he was an Atheist at the time he wrote this poem, he was also a poet who believed in
spirituality, “divinity” and the “soul.” Sensations, feelings, a life poignantly brief, “These are the measures destined for her soul.” And no more. Enter the old theme of seize the day.
III
Past measures of the human soul are western mythologies, beginning with the Greek and Roman. Pagan gods, represented by Jove transcendent in the Sky, reduced humans to a herd of animals, if not asses— “hinds.” The virgin birth of Christ referenced by the star mingled the human “with heaven,” bringing “requital to desire”—the desire for godlike immortality. Now that modern man—or woman, as in this poem—no longer believes in immortality, the experience of divinity and the potential of human fulfillment may be lost. “Shall our blood fail?”
Or shall we accept that we must create divinity within ourselves and live accordingly. If we accept Reality, we will feel more comfortable resigned to an indifferent universe. Stevens here takes up a major theme of the Naturalistic fiction writers and turns a negative into a positive. We will no longer have to reconcile the prevalence of evil in the world, as the early Melville struggled to do, with faith in a benevolent almighty God. “The sky will be much friendlier then than now,” because we will feel united with Nature rather than divided from the divine and ignored. Then we can appreciate Nature for its “glory” next to “enduring love.” IV
Up to this point she has been talking silently to herself, the only character introduced into the poem. Now the quotation marks indicate that she speaks “aloud” for the first time, asking herself what happens to her inner divinity when she dies. The voice within refers to her in the third person, implying transcendence of her ego. To suppose that the narrative voice is coming from outside the woman is contrary to the realistic tenor and to the organic form of the poem. The relationship between the two voices in Stanza IV corresponds to the relationship in Jungian psychology between the conscious ego and the deeper Self, the transcendent center of the psyche—our archetypal connection to divine Nature. Whether he intended to do so or not, in this poem Stevens dramatizes the individuation process of inner dialogue between the ego and the Self, leading to reconciliation and the integrity of the psyche.
The poetry throughout this stanza is the most Shakespearean in American literature. The beauty of the language reinforces the authority of her inner voice, which declares that, though they are beautiful, all the religions of the world including Christianity, referenced by “heaven’s hill,” are transitory myths. All religions will eventually die. Nature alone endures, including human nature and our “holy” longing for divinity. Stevens’s rhetorical power and elegiac tone convey his own longing and feeling of pathos at being unable to accept Christianity—until the end of his life.
The stanza begins and ends with birds, sustaining the motif of freeing the spirit. Psychological development, or individuation, is symbolized by the changing types of birds. The uncaged cockatoo is replaced by “wakened birds” that “test the reality” they perceive with “sweet questionings.” Her new vision of Reality is imaged at the end of the stanza by “the consummation of the swallow’s wings.” The tip of a swallow’s wing is so fine it tapers into invisibility, implying that the end of all is in the material world, even though it may appear to extend beyond. This image is the center of the poem, between two phases of development perfectly balanced like the wings of a bird and equaling 8--the sign of infinity. The symmetrical structure, logical form and measured blank verse are aesthetic characteristic of Neoclassicism, whereas the lifestyle values affirmed in the poem are Romantic.
V
Still feeling “the need of some imperishable bliss,” she speaks only two lines in this stanza, after speaking four in the preceding one. And she does not speak again. Her naïve desire for immortality is displaced by the authoritative voice of Reality within: “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires.” Paradoxically, it is death—“sure obliteration”—that fulfills life. Awareness of death makes us value and appreciate life more fully and intensely. Otherwise we would take too much for granted and would fail to be nourished by our
After the declaration that Christianity is merely a myth, the quotation marks are dropped and the final lines confirm that the woman has accepted Reality. The two contrasting perspectives in the poem, the conscious ego and the deeper Self, have been reconciled. The feminine and the masculine have united. In Jungian terms, after an inner dialogue, her ego has submitted to the sovereignty of her deeper Self, or soul. Her psyche has attained wholeness. This happens in a short time in the poem, whereas in real life the individuation process takes many years, even a lifetime—and often never proceeds very far.
The poem ends with a reiteration of themes: “We live in an old chaos of the sun.” Like the universe, we humans are merely accidents, not part of any divine order. Earth is an isolated “island solitude, unsponsored, free”—but it too is subject to inescapable death. We should be consoled by our freedom to be as joyously spontaneous as the birds and the deer, by the beauty of Nature and by all the sensory pleasures we have to enjoy and the many we have yet to discover, as imaged by sweet berries ripening in the wilderness. The final image is of a dignified, even “casual” descent into death. The cockatoo in Stanza I, displaced by the swallow when the woman “awakens” in Stanza IV, is succeeded at the end by flocks of pigeons, birds that are well adapted to Reality like the ring of men, but they are placid rather than turbulent. The calm of the pigeons displaces the calm that disturbed the woman in Stanza I. These birds accept their vulnerable place in Nature with grace, exemplifying a transcendence within themselves.
“Sunday Morning” is perhaps the most beautiful of Modernist poems, yet it prefigures in idealized form characteristics of the decadent Postmodernist culture of the late 20 th^ century that Stevens did not live to witness: (1) atheistic; (2) hedonistic; (3) solipsistic; (4) regressive; (5) amoral; and (6) turns people into pigeons. At the end of his life Stevens was converted to Christianity by a priest and baptized a month before he died, recanting the atheism of this and other poems. Michael Hollister (2015)
