Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens critical analysis, "Death is the mother of beauty"

 

Sunday Morning
BY WALLACE STEVENS

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

•       One of America’s most respected twentieth century poet

•        Master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary

•       A philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously employing  the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality

•       Often considered a difficult poet because of technical and thematic complexity

•       An eminent abstractionist and provocative thinker

Works

•       Poems

Peter Quince at the Clavier

The whole of Harmonium

Le Monocle de mon oncle

Domination of Black

The Emperor of Icecream

Sea surface full of clouds

Collected poems (1954)- Awarded Pulitzer Prize

•       Play

Three Travelers watch a Sunrise

Carlos among the candles

•       Prose

The Necessary angel  (1951)

Awards

•       Bollengen Prize for Poetry 1949

•       National Book award for Poetry 1951

•       Frost Medal 1951

•       Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1955

1

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.

•       It’s a Sabbath day and a woman is dressed in  a light morning gown (peignoir) enjoying coffee and oranges in the company of a cockatoo

•       The woman begins to doze off into dream and even in her lapsed condition she has interest in religion

•       There is a subtle allusion to Christ walking on water in the latter part of the first stanza as she dreams her mind going off to Palestine, the holy land where Christ was crucified and buried in a tomb

•       The things depicted in the language are either of natural or religious tone

2

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.

•       The  fundamental questions start to arise within. The word Bounty means generosity. The old religion is demanding her life, but why should she sacrifice that for a shady sense of divinity?

•       Nature elicits the deepest feeling in human beings, why not become one with the natural world and accept the highs and lows of emotional life

•       The woman’s conscience suggests to her that divinity lies within her own psyche

•       The last line suggest that all the pleasure and pains are going to affect her soul. Soul is the collective emotional nature of who are as humans

3

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.

This stanza outlines a history of the religious god, beginning with Jove, the Roman god of the sky (aka Jupiter) who controlled thunder and lightening,

•       Jove had no human birth, unlike Jesus who was born to a virgin into a society ruled by invading Romans.

•       The speaker asks three vital questions concerning the blood (human life force ) and its future state of being

•       The speaker goes on to imply that his new paradise will enable humankind to enjoy a shared world, as the divine idea will change and gods will no longer live separately there

4

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.

As if listening to the speaker’s argument the woman asks a question

•       She describes how happy she is listening to birds in a flied but once they’re gone she questions whether observation is enough to restore the ideal. Can human senses experiencing nature even replace or compensate for disappearing concept of paradise

•       The speaker insist that her remembered experiences will prevail over any that are supernatural

5

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.

•       The dialogue continue with the woman expressing the need for an immortal reward in heaven, to live forever is a longing hard to nullify

•       The speaker describes the nature cycles of change that exist within life “Death is the mother of beauty” this is the basic truth of nature

•       The seed lives the seed dies and from it springs new growth and new life. From willow trees to plums and pears and human change is the beauty and it refreshes all

6

 

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.

•       This stanza asks if change occurs in paradise, does death occur in paradise. The speaker suggest that there is stasis that supernatural brings stagnation for human beings it is set

•       With the idea that beauty comes from the acceptance of a final death there is some mystery retained  in this natural flux because there are imperfections which makes us wonder

7

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.

•       Now he speaker outlines a vision of what could be, an alternative to the rituals od supernatural religion a new faith in effect

•       This new faith shall be natural. This stanza is full of natural imagery and within this landscape stands a ring of men chanting

•       Stevens tempers this with religious or biblical language as if suggest that the change will come only gradually as the old faith in Christian god dies out

•        there will be an intimate knowledge of each death and each birth everything will be renewed afresh

8

 

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.

 

•       The woman hears a voice a biblical voice perhaps, like the voice of John the Baptist who cried out in the wilderness “ Make straight way of the Lord”

•       The speaker concludes “we’re still influenced by the old religion and their gods, they bring chaos , they isolate, we cannot escape yet”

•       The woman perhaps remains torn between a need for pleasure and need to know that the imperishable bliss is still attainable.

Themes

•       Belief in supernatural Vs. belief in reality

•       Idea of paradise Vs. Earthly pleasures

•       Fading away of established religion

•       Establishment of new belief system

•       Death immortality and beauty

•       Happiness

•       Choices

•       Religion

•       Nature and human

•       duty

 

Appreciation

•       Alliteration

“holy hush/ winding across wide water/ balm or beauty/ part or pain”

•       Assonance

When two or more words in close alliance have the same sounding vowel. “green freedom/ calm darkens”

•       Enjambment

When a lines runs into the next with no punctuation but maintaing sense. “and the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice”

Symbols

•       The Sun

•       The sky

•       Birds : Cockatoo (funeral gift that ancient people bring to a procession while visiting an important tomb), quail, pigeon

•       Fruits : oranges, pears and plums, berries

•       Water

•       Morning  and evening

•       Blood , Christian belief (sacrifice of Christ), pagan belief (human energy)

•       Death

 

Enigmatic poem,  that is part metaphysical, part romantic an explores the idea of the origin and end od eras of human belief

8 Stanzas 15 lines each = 120 lines

Minor crisis- loss of faith

Stevens “this is not essentially a woman’s meditation on religion and the meaning of life.  It is everybody’s meditation. The poem is simply an expression of paganism.”