Nov 15, 2009

Sunday Morning | Introduction

“Sunday Morning,” one of the collected pieces in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923), has been singled out as one of his most eloquent and thematically resonant poems. Stevens wrote the first version of the poem in 1914, which was published by Poetry the next year. Harriet Monroe, the editor of the journal, omitted three stanzas of the poem for its publication and significantly rearranged the remaining five stanzas. Stevens made considerable changes, especially to the ending, by the time he collected it in Harmonium.

J. Hillis Miller in “William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens,” writes that Stevens’s poetry is “a prolonged exploration, both in theoretical speculation within the poetry itself and in poetic practice, of the power of language not so much to name reality as to uncover it.” This uncovering of reality becomes the focus of “Sunday Morning” as it chronicles one woman’s search for spiritual fulfillment in a philosophical dialogue between her and Stevens’s poetic persona. Throughout the poem, the two examine two contrasting ideologies: that of Christianity and of paganism. The woman must decide which will help her find the spiritual satisfaction she is seeking.

The poet presents compelling arguments through a series of eloquent images centering on the beauty of the natural world. When the woman notes that this beauty is transitory, the poet counters, “death is the mother of beauty,” insisting that the fact of death enhances beauty. After careful consideration of the poet’s line of reasoning, by the end of the poem, the woman determines that a devotion to earthly pleasures and not the dead religion of the past will provide her with divine bliss.

Sunday Morning Summary

In the first stanza, a complacent woman lounges in her dressing gown late into a Sunday morning, eating a leisurely breakfast and enjoying the vivid, vibrant beauty of the natural world around her. She takes great pleasure in her coffee and oranges, her mood reflected by the “sunny” chair and the cockatoo that has been released onto the rug. She is spending a morning at home instead of going to church. The reference to the “holy hush of ancient sacrifice” suggests that the day is Easter Sunday. Initially, the pull of the natural world dissipates the traditional power this day has over the woman, as she has chosen not to take part in Christian rituals. However, as she dreams, the pleasure she experiences this morning is soon extinguished by “the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe,” a reference to the crucifixion of Christ. She recognizes that the secular beauty she appreciates is not eternal, and so the colorful oranges and parrot, earlier appearing so full of life, now “seem things in some procession of the dead.”

She becomes caught up in Christian dogma as “her dreaming feet” transport her to the “dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” symbolic of the ritualistic ceremony in celebration of the Last Supper and Christ’s interment. The blood refers to the wine and the sepulchre to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that contained the tomb where Christ’s body was laid on Good Friday. Thus, the sensual pleasure of the late morning coffee and oranges has been replaced by the spiritual satisfaction of the bread and wine communion.

The voice of the poet questions the woman’s decision to turn her back on the beauty of the natural world and devote herself to her religion. He insists that she could find divinity through a connection to the splendor of the earth. Her earthly pleasures, which he enumerates in this stanza through images of the seasons, should be as cherished as “the thought of heaven.” The poet exhorts her to appreciate the very transience of her world since it encompasses the pleasures and pains of living. These passions, not the superstitions that live in “silent shadows and in... » Complete Sunday Morning Summary