Sunday Morning

Stevens begins his long, eight-sectioned “Sunday Morning” with a list. The list describes a woman’s relaxed, Church-less Sunday morning routine, and it continues throughout the poem’s first sentence, from its first to fifth lines. The first item on the list, “Complacencies of the peignoir” (Line 1), defines the attitude out of which the poem’s rhetoric grows, and it reveals that the poem's central character is a woman. A peignoir is a women’s robe worn over a nightgown. Its delicacy and French name also point to the woman's economic class. Here is a woman, living in comfort, seemingly unburdened by either economic ties to a partner or social responsibilities to a Church.

Despite the comforts of her late breakfast, described as “complacen[t]” (Line 1), “sunny” (Line 2), and “free[ ]” (Line 3), the woman’s thoughts still turn toward “the dark” (Line 6) of “that old catastrophe” (Line 7) of religion and, presumably, the death and resurrection of Christ in particular. The previously familiar trappings of her morning—“The pungent oranges and bright, green wings” (Line 9) of the cockatoo—transform into “things in some procession of the dead” (Line 10). As she “dreams a little” (Line 6), she thinks of the “passing of her dreaming feet / Over the seas” (Lines 13-14), mirroring a Christ who walks on water.

The second section begins with a question, seemingly posed by the poem or a narrator of the poem who is separate from the woman having breakfast. Despite this separation, the question is implied to be the woman’s own: “Why should she give her bounty to the dead?” (Line 16). This section sets the stage for the poem’s central tension between the transcendent supernatural and the immanent natural. Here, “divinity” (Line 17) is “Only in silent shadows and in dreams” (Line 18), while the immanent is “in comforts of the sun” (Line 19) and “any balm or beauty of the earth” (Line 21). Even the “pungent fruit” (Line 20) of the woman’s breakfast is part of the non-supernatural beauty of the earth. Instead of a traditional theistic divinity, the poem proposes that “Divinity must live within [the woman] herself” (Line 23), describing a pantheist or panentheist conception of religion that eliminates a transcendent otherworld. Curiously, the poem still describes the woman’s “soul” (Line 30), though it defines this in terms of her “Grievings in loneliness” (Line 25), “Elations” (Line 26), and “gusty / Emotions” (Lines 26-27). In other words, Stevens presents a view of the soul not as a supernatural piece of eternity but as a nexus of “All pleasures and all pains” (Line 28) of earthly living.

The third stanza leaves the woman and her morning to instead outline a genealogy of the Western relationship to divinity. First, it describes the Roman god “Jove” (Line 31). While Jove “moved among us, as a muttering king” (Line 34), he was not born on earth. Instead, his “inhuman birth” (Line 31) kept him separate from the immanent: “No mother suckled him” (Line 32) and “no sweet land” (Line 32) helped form “his mythy mind” (Line 33). Eventually, however, human beings desired a “commingling” of “our blood” (Line 36) “With heaven” (Line 37). This god who was born a human birth is “discerned […] in a star” (Line 38)—in other words, the star of Bethlehem that signaled the mythic birth of the fully human and fully divine Christ. Here, Stevens has presented a view of the stages of Western religious thought: the totally divine and inhumane Jove; the meeting point between divine and human Christ; and a potential future where either “our blood fail[s]” (Line 39) or “the earth [will] / Seem all of paradise that we shall know” (Lines 40-41). The poem conceives of this potential third stage of Western religious thought as characterized by a “sky […] much friendlier […] than now” (Line 42), a sky characterized by “enduring love” (Line 44) and its inclusion with humanity in the immanence of nature. Instead, humanity’s current sky is a “dividing and indifferent blue” (Line 45), a barrier between the living world of nature and the eternal heaven of the gods.

At the halfway section in the poem, the text drops a certain level of pretense toward descriptive lyric verse and, instead, becomes explicitly a kind of philosophical dialogue. Unlike the Platonic dialogue tradition to which it perhaps is nodding, the poem does not introduce a second character to act as a rhetorical mouthpiece. Instead, it puts the narratorial voice of the poem in direct dialogue with the poem’s central character, creating a complicated relationship between poet, speaker, and persona. This shift is initiated by the first instance of dialogue in the poem, with its fourth section beginning, “She says, ‘[…] when the birds are gone […] where, then, is paradise?’” (Lines 46, 49, 50). The speaker of the poem responds that no supernaturalist paradise, no “haunt of prophecy” (Line 51), “has endured / As April's green endures; or will endure” (Lines 56-57).

This first counterargument that the poem makes against its own central character is made not only by reasoning but by poetic strategies. When the speaker describes religious paradises, the language of the text becomes archaic, both in tone and in diction: “Neither the golden underground, nor isle / Melodious, where spirits gat them home” (Lines 53-54). The descriptions of nature are also beautiful but spare and characterized by fewer frills and archaic terms: “Like her remembrance of awakened birds, / Or her desire for June and evening” (Lines 58-59).

Following the dialogue structure from the previous section, the poem’s fifth section finds its protagonist unable to shake “The need of some imperishable bliss” (Line 62). While the woman is dissatisfied by the loss of the eternal promise of a religious paradise, the poem responds, “Death is the mother of beauty” (Line 63). Both “dreams” (Line 64) and “desires” (Line 65) can only be fulfilled in relation to death, according to the poem. This argument dominates the fifth and sixth sections, which contrast the “boys […] pil[ing] new plums and pears” (Line 73) in defiance of their eventual decomposition with the “ripe fruit [that] never fall[s]” (Line 77) in eternal paradise.

In its seventh section, the poem again shifts its focus away from the woman, now imagining a pagan future of natural immanence. In this future, religion is not absent per se—people still “chant in orgy on a summer morn” (Line 92)—but it is oriented toward nature and not toward a deathless otherworld. People give “devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / […] like a savage source” (Lines 93-95). Instead of paradise existing apart from the worshippers as a promise of a beyond, it is a “paradise, / Out of their blood” (Lines 96-97), a paradise with a choir of “The trees” instead of “serafin” (Line 100) (the less common French plural of seraph/seraphim, a kind of Christian angel). While it is an orgiastic sun-worshipping chant demonstrating the kind of post-religious religion in which Stevens is interested, the principle applies just as well to the coffee and oranges the peignoir-wearing woman enjoys on her Sunday morning.

The woman reappears in the poem’s eighth and final section, now hearing “A voice” (Line 107) that claims Christ’s tomb was not the site of resurrection but “the grave of Jesus, where he lay” (Line 109). The form of this realization parallels Biblical prophecies, or angelic proclamations. Despite her affirmation of paganistic thinking and departure from Christian thinking, the woman must still contend with the fact that “We live in an old chaos” (Line 110) of supernatural thinking, or an “old dependency” (Line 111) on religion. Even with the inescapability of the transcendent, religious thinking for the current age, the poem asserts that, still, “Deer walk upon our mountains” (Line 114). Even the sky, which has so long represented the supernatural beyond in Western religious thought (a “heaven above”), is populated with “casual flocks of pigeons” (Line 118).

While the poem begins in morning—the titular “Sunday Morning”—it concludes “At evening” (Line 118). The morning of the early sections mirrored the hope of a new day, a day dawning of a naturalistic focus on this world and not a supernatural otherworld. The evening of the poem’s ending, with the pigeons “sink[ing] / Downward to darkness, on extended wings” (Lines 119-120) describes the other side of the issue, the sun setting on the central position of widespread Western religious thinking. The wistfulness of the final lines communicates both celebration and loss. While Stevens celebrates the paganist beauty to come, the “extended wings” (Line 120) of the pigeons evoke angelic wings descending into a dark oblivion.