Sunday Morning

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

Stevens first published “Sunday Morning” in Poetry magazine in 1915, albeit in a somewhat abbreviated and altered form than he eventually published in his book Harmonium (1923). At the time, the Western world was going through a number of upheavals, including ideological shifts. The eruption of the first World War in 1914 shattered the prevailing Western view of its own civilization: namely, that continued advancement in their society was reaching nearly into utopia. When Europe exploded into all-out war, fought in a bloody brutality of technological advancements in weaponry, vehicles, and trench-oriented tactics, all manner of cultural assumptions were challenged. While Christianity was no longer the unshaking political and cultural force it was in the West prior to the Renaissance, its worldview was still by and large the dominant one in Western culture.

It is on this stage of upheaval and disillusionment that Stevens writes and publishes “Sunday Morning.” While the poem was certainly not published in an era where Stevens could have been accused of heresy or found himself in danger for criticizing the church’s views, it was published at the forefront of a gradual shift in American thought that followed the harsh imaginative break of World War I.

Biographical Context

Stevens was born into a religious family, proud descendants of famous 19th-century missionary Johannes Zeller. The Stevens family were members of a Dutch Reformed Church and, when he came of age, Stevens attended associated parochial schools. After studying both classical and contemporary literature and philosophy, Stevens moved away from the Christianity of his youth and, instead, became interested in rethinking modes of living in the world without traditional religion.

While these themes are prevalent in “Sunday Morning,” one of the first poems that Stevens published, they would continue to influence his work. When Stevens died, he left behind a large unfinished project, namely, to rewrite Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy for people who “live in the world of Darwin and not the world of Plato” (Grey, Thomas. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press, 1991). Friedrich Nietzsche’s influence on Stevens’s thought and poetry has been well documented, and Nietzsche was certainly an influence in Stevens’s quest to conceptualize a world without traditional religion. Nietzsche’s central criticism of Christian religion is famously its otherworldliness, or its focus on a transcendent reality instead of an immanent one, a theme that “Sunday Morning” communicates in abundance.