Waking Early Sunday Morning (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
The Poem
“Waking Early Sunday Morning” is a long lyric poem, a meditation on mortality in fourteen eight-line stanzas. The title invites comparison with Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” and indeed the poem may be read as Robert Lowell’s pessimistic, Puritan-tinged reply to Stevens’s celebration of an earthly paradise. Stevens evokes a lushly fertile world in which the “balm and beauty of the earth” is heaven enough, but, in Lowell’s vision, the earth is no longer a garden but an exhausted volcano, its violence all but spent, “a ghost/ orbiting...
[The entire page is 1559 words long]
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