Sunday Morning

“Sunday Morning” is one of Wallace Stevens’s most famous works of poetry. The text is also one of the first poems Stevens ever published, appearing in a 1915 edition of Poetry magazine before its inclusion in Stevens’s first book, Harmonium (1923). The poem is a longer work of several sections, using stylistic references to 19th-century poetry to grapple with religious ideas. The poem is the first of many works Stevens wrote throughout his career that argues for a turn away from traditional, Christian ideology and toward an embrace of the immanent world of nature.

Poet Biography

Stevens was born to a prosperous Protestant family in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. Stevens grew up highly educated, even attending Harvard as a non-degree student for a few years as a teenager. In early adulthood, Stevens worked as a journalist before attending, and graduating from, New York Law School, becoming the third son in his family to earn a law degree. After several years of courting, Stevens married Elsie Viola Kachel, a woman whom his parents considered lower-class and lacking education. Because of his parents’ disapproval and refusal to attend the wedding, Stevens became estranged from his family for the remainder of his father’s life. Stevens lived and worked in New York City in law firms for several years, before switching into the insurance business and moving his family to Hartford, Connecticut.

Stevens started writing poetry in college. While working as an insurance executive, Stevens wrote in earnest in his leisure time and submitted his work for publication. In 1914, he published a scattering of poems, which he would not include in any published volumes. It wasn’t until 1915 (at the age of 36) that Stevens broke onto the literary scene with the publication of a prize-winning play and two poems, including “Sunday Morning,” in Poetry magazine. While Stevens would remain in his comfortable executive job (even turning down an offer to teach at Harvard to remain in insurance), he found great success in his second, literary career. Stevens published several books of poetry, a collection of essays, and some plays. Stevens received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a Frost Medal, and the National Book Award for Poetry. After a full life, Stevens died of cancer in 1955. His work is considered by many scholars to be some of the most important Modernist verse to come out of the United States.

Poem Text

     I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a 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 prophecy,

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 fulfilment 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

Whispered a little out of tenderness,

She makes the willow shiver in the sun

For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze

Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.

She causes boys to pile new plums and pears

On disregarded plate. The maidens taste

And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

      VI

Is there no change of death in paradise?

Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs

Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,

Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,

With rivers like our own that seek for seas

They never find, the same receding shores

That never touch with inarticulate pang?

Why set the pear upon those river-banks

Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?

Alas, that they should wear our colors there,

The silken weavings of our afternoons,

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,

Within whose burning bosom we devise

Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

      VII

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source.

Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,

Out of their blood, returning to the sky;

And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,

The windy lake wherein their lord delights,

The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,

That choir among themselves long afterward.

They shall know well the heavenly fellowship

Of men that perish and of summer morn.

And whence they came and whither they shall go

The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

      VIII

She hears, upon that water without sound,

A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

We live in an old chaos of the sun,

Or old dependency of day and night,

Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,

Of that wide water, inescapable.

Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail

Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;

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.

Stevens, Wallace. “Sunday Morning.” 1915. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” is a poem in eight sections following one woman’s Sunday morning grapple with religious belief and doctrine. Each section is made up of 15 lines of blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. The poem begins with the unnamed woman protagonist enjoying a “late / Coffee” (Lines 1-2) and breakfast instead of attending church. The first section details her breakfast and subsequent shift in thought toward the “ancient sacrifice” (Line 5) of Christian religious ideas.

The poem’s second section enters into a rhetorical mode, asking, “What is divinity” (Line 17) and “Why should [the woman] give” (Line 16) herself to beliefs of “the dead” (Line 16). This section proposes that, in fact, “Divinity must live within [the woman] herself” (Line 23), emphasizing the importance of nature in any move away from supernatural thinking.

In the third section, Stevens describes the mythological Roman god Jove (i.e., Jupiter, or the Greek Zeus) and his “inhuman birth” (Line 31). After setting the mythological groundwork of Western religious tradition, the poem wonders if human “blood [will] fail” (Line 39) or if we will achieve a nonreligious paradise on earth defined by “enduring love” (Line 44).

The poem’s fourth section brings the text’s narrator into dialogue with the unnamed woman, who wonders whether the bounty of nature is enough to replace eternal “paradise” (Line 50). According to the poem’s narrator, though, there is no afterlife that “has endured” (Line 56) as long “As April’s green endures” (Line 57).

Continuing the dialogue, the fifth section famously claims that “Death is the mother of beauty” (Line 63). For Stevens, eternal paradise cannot fulfill “our dreams / And our desires” (Lines 64-65) because there is no death, no end, and so no true beauty. The poem continues arguing for this critique of eternity in its sixth section. Conceived without death, paradise becomes locked in stagnation, with “ripe fruit [that will] never fall” (Line 77) and “rivers […] that seek for seas / They never find” (Lines 80-81).

The final two sections of the poem imagine a future free from supernaturalist religions and grapple with the shadow they continue to cast in the present. In section seven, imagined people of the future chant “[t]heir boisterous devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be” (Lines 93-94). Instead of angels, “[t]he trees” (Line 100) “choir among themselves” (Line 101). Devotion to an otherworldly beyond has shifted to a devotion to the here and now, to the immanence of nature.

The poem’s concluding section begins with an almost prophetic voice heard by the central woman of the poem, claiming that the old Christian “tomb in Palestine” (Line 107) is not a spiritual site of resurrection but “the grave of Jesus, where he lay” (Line 109). Despite this knowledge, the poem must admit, “We live in an old chaos” (Line 110) of supernatural, religious ideas. Stevens concludes his poem with what the text most reveres, rich instantiations of the natural world.