Sunday Morning

By Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens is one of America’s most respected 20th century poets. He

was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous
precision in crafting his poems. He was also a philosopher of aesthetics,
vigorously exploring the notion of poetry. Stevens was sometimes considered a
difficult poet, but he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and
provocative thinker.
Stevens was born on the 2nd of October, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania
and died on the 2nd of August, 1955, in Hartford, Connecticut. He went to Harvard
as an undergraduate and he earned a law degree from New York University and
practiced there from 1904 to 1916. In that year, he joined the legal staff of the
Hartford Accident and Indemnity CO. a firm of which he was elected vice-
president in 1934, and with which he remained all his life. his poems did not
appear in Poetry until Stevens was thirty-five, and not until he was forty-four did
he publish a book, Harmonium (1923), a collection whose title calls attention to
the poet’s universal interest in music.
Some of his poems are: The Necessary Angel, Idea of Order, Owl’s
Clover, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Collected Poems etc.
‘Sunday Morning’ is one of Wallace Stevens’s most celebrated poems. It
first appeared in 1915 in the magazine Poetry, although the fuller version was
only published in Stevens’s landmark collection Harmonium in 1923. Yvor
Winters, an influential critic of modernist poetry and a minor modernist in his
own right, pronounced ‘Sunday Morning’ to be ‘the greatest American poem of
the twentieth century’. The poem is a meditation on not being a Christian.
‘Sunday Morning’ is divided into eight sections or stanzas, and focuses on
a woman who stays at home, lounging around, on a Sunday morning, when
virtually everyone else is at church. Unlike the majority of Stevens’ poems, this
piece is fairly well organized and written in blank verse. This means that the lines
do not have a rhyme scheme but maintain the pattern of iambic pentameter.
Symbols of the poem are the sun and the cockatoo. The sun shines on the
woman on her Sunday morning and represents comfort and peace. But the sun
also acts like a god rather than being one. The cockatoo stands in for freedom,
then later comes to represent beauty, happiness, peace and paradise.

Regarding themes, the speaker discusses the interactions between nature

and humanity. To human kind nature symbolizes both paradise and death. The
speaker also brings up images of nature associated with religion. Additionally,
there is the overwhelming theme of happiness. The poem begins with the woman
thinking over her own happiness on Sunday morning and considering whether or
not she should feel guilty.
The poem begins with the speaker describing a woman spending her
Sunday morning sitting outside rather than going to church. She falls into a dream
that makes her feel a guilty about the death of Christ. The dream includes a
journey to Palestine and Christ’s tomb. Although she feels something, she is still
skeptical about religion. She isn’t ready to give up her life and all its pleasures to
the Christian god.
In the next stanza the speaker compares Christ to the Greek and Roman god
Jove. Jove is different because he only represents the sun, rather than actually
being it. The speaker wonders over the desire of humans to create religion and
whether or not paradise can exist.
The fourth stanza actually sees the woman of ‘Sunday Morning’ speaking
out loud, rather than the speaker relaying her inner thoughts. It shows that, whilst
the wonders of the world endure, the revelations of divinity have not, in the
modern world – not to people like the woman at the centre of ‘Sunday Morning’,
anyway.
The fifth stanza sees the woman developing her line of thought from the
previous stanza. Is the contentment of watching the birds taking off, of taking
pleasure in the ‘paradise’ of earthly sights, really enough? Death, we are told in a
famous quotation, is the ‘mother of beauty’: we find beauty in the knowledge that
things do not last, that they are short-lived and will die.
The sixth stanza sees the speaker of the poem wondering whether things
die in ‘paradise’ or Heaven, if it exists. When the fruit grows ripe, does it not fall
from the tree? Again, the speaker asserts that ‘Death is the mother of beauty’:
anywhere that calls itself paradise must surely contain death, to be beautiful.
The seventh stanza returns to the alternative system of worship to
Christianity, namely paganism, mentioned in the third stanza. Here, though, we’re
not in the realm of Jove, but witnessing a ritual whereby naked men walk around
in a ring, chanting their devotion to the sun, which they worship like a god.
The eighth and final stanza returns to where it began: the woman sitting in
her chair of a Sunday morning. She hears a voice talking about Palestine as the
place of Jesus’ tomb, not the abode of spirits: it’s just a place where the body of a
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man (not a god) named Jesus was buried. The speaker of the poem concludes that
we are unsponsored and free, without supernatural supervision or punishment.
The world of nature is all around us, and the sky doesn’t contain any heavenly
deities, just flocks of pigeons flying in the evening.
In my opinion, this is one of the best poetry I’ve ever read because it
expresses exactly how I feel right now, questioning the existence of God and
everything around me too. In a world where science has taken over, you start to
question some things, and for sure, the evidence of science seems more tangible
than believing in something every culture has, a god. The ‘speaker’ compares
Jesus to Jove, suggesting that Jesus is any other God. I also agree with that,
because every culture has its god who they think it’s perfect and the only true
God. Anyway, the gods are human’s creation. I still do not understand how
people can believe and trust the Bible, a bok that has been handed from hand to
hand for so many centuries, clearly it’s changed a lot from the first edition. But
everyone is free to believe whatever they want.
First of all, the beginning of the poem transmits such a comfortable feeling,
of a sunny morning, where the sun warms your skin and the smell of coffee and
oranges is floating in the air and everywhere you look is green and all you can
hear is the chirping of the birds and the whispering wind. The first stanza sent me
in another world, in an autumn cozy late morning. I find these, the small pleasures
of life that must be cherished. To me, it looks like the perfect morning next to
your pet friend. I am an animal and nature lover, so I love to admire everything
that’s nature-related.
Second of all, I can relate so much with this poem because I’ve been
through some dark times because of my death phobia. I would spend hours and
hours a day wondering what’s happening after you die. And the fact that I could
not find a solid answer to my questions, made me even more scared. But I’ve
realized that there is nothing after you die, you just die. And that scared me the
most, I wanted there to be something, I wanted to believe that ‘Heaven’ exists.
But now, I realized how short life is and that we live like we’re going to live
forever, so from time to time, I just stop everything I’m doing and feel grateful
that I am alive, that I have the privilege to live. And I think everyone should do
the same, to feel grateful that they are alive.
In conclusion, I enjoyed reading this poem and I am really glad I’ve found
it because it has become my favorite poem at the moment. I especially loved the
dreamy and euphoric feelings it gave me whilst reading it. I truly believe this
poem is a masterpiece.

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Bibliography

1. Ciocoi-Pop, Dumitru, Notes on Modern American Literature, Editura

Societății Academice Anglofone din România Universitatea „Lucian
Blaga”, Sibiu, 1999
2. Ciocoi-Pop, Dumitru, Burdușel, Eva Nicoleta, A reader of Modern
American Literature Part Two, Editura LBUS Press, Sibiu, 2003

Webography

1. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens
2. https://interestingliterature.com/2020/02/wallace-stevens-sunday-
morning-analysis-summary/
3. https://poemanalysis.com/wallace-stevens/sunday-morning/