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
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Prose
The Necessary angel (1951)
Awards
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Bollengen Prize for Poetry 1949
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National Book award for Poetry 1951
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Frost Medal 1951
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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”
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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
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Belief in supernatural Vs. belief
in reality
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Idea of paradise Vs. Earthly
pleasures
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Fading away of established religion
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Establishment of new belief system
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Death immortality and beauty
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Happiness
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Choices
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Religion
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Nature and human
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duty
Appreciation
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Alliteration
“holy hush/ winding
across wide water/ balm or beauty/ part or pain”
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Assonance
When two or more words
in close alliance have the same sounding vowel. “green freedom/ calm darkens”
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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
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The Sun
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The sky
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Birds : Cockatoo (funeral gift that
ancient people bring to a procession while visiting an important tomb), quail,
pigeon
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Fruits : oranges, pears and plums,
berries
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Water
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Morning and evening
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Blood , Christian belief (sacrifice
of Christ), pagan belief (human energy)
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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.”