Sunday Morning by Wallace
Stevens Meaning
The publication of "Sunday Morning" established Stevens as a
major poet of the Modernist era. The poem centers on an
unnamed woman contemplating religion and the meaning of
life in her apartment on a Sunday morning. Rich in religious
and philosophical themes and full of complicated symbolism,
the poem explores the possibility of a meaningful life in the
absence of God and religion.
Modernism: an artistic movement (including literature,
poetry, music, painting, and architecture) that began in the
late 19th century and reached its high point in the 1910s
through the 1930s. Modernist works can be characterized by
their experimentality as they broke established rules and
abandoned forms in an attempt to create something new and
different. Key modernist artists include the poet T. S. Eliot,
the novelist James Joyce, and the painter Pablo Picasso.
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Summary
"Sunday Morning" is concerned with the question of how life can be
meaningful in the absence of religious belief. The poem does not focus on
proving or disproving the existence of God but rather suggests that traditional
(particularly Christian) religious beliefs no longer provide meaning or even
inspiration.
The poem is about how life can be meaningful even without God or religion.
It proposes that meaning can be found in the beauty of the natural world that
surrounds us and in paying attention to how we feel when we experience it.
The inevitability and permanence of death, which lets us know that this
experience is limited and can't be repeated, is key to experiencing the world
as meaningful.
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Analysis
The final form of "Sunday Morning" contains eight stanzas, with each stanza
comprising 15 lines. In this section, we will take a detailed look at each one.
Stanza I
"Sunday Morning" is more a poem of ideas than a narrative or story. This
means that nothing really happens in terms of a plot or progression of events.
Instead, the poem focuses on the ideas going through a woman's head as she
sits in her apartment, strewn with little luxuries such as "Coffee and oranges
in a sunny chair / And the freedom of a green cockatoo" (lines 2–3).2 The
unnamed woman, still in her "peignoir" or dressing gown, seems to be simply
relaxing at home in a contemplative mood.
Coffee and oranges in the woman's apartment prompt her comparison of
worldly pleasures and religious duty, Pixabay.
The poem's title draws attention to the fact that she is at home and not
attending church on a Sunday morning. While this may strike many of us as
unremarkable today, in Stevens' time, the decision not to attend church would
have sent a clear message about someone's religious skepticism or unbelief.
The woman in Stevens' poem is aware of this and clearly feels a kind of guilt
about her failure to attend church. As she daydreams in her apartment, her
thoughts wander to "that old catastrophe" (line 7) in "silent Palestine" (line
14). The "catastrophe" refers to the crucifixion and death of Jesus.
Stevens often makes use of free indirect speech, and it is not always clear
whether the speaker of the poem is presenting the woman's thoughts or the
speaker's own. The first stanza tells us that "She dreams a little" and that "she
feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe" when thinking of
Christianity (lines 6-7).
Free indirect speech: a narrative technique where the thoughts or speech of
a character are presented through a narrator or speaker without direct speech
or quotation. This blurs the line between first and third person narration,
making it unclear from whose perspective the narration is being told.
Stanza II
The second stanza begins with the question: "Why should she give her
bounty to the dead?" (line 16) and then proceeds to describe a world of
natural beauty seemingly more deserving of her time.
The poem often follows this question-answer format, giving us the
impression of a dialogue between two people. It is unclear whether this
represents the speaker of the poem interacting with the woman or a kind of
internal monologue that the poem's speaker has special access to.
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The story of Jesus' death and crucifixion does not help the woman in the
poem give meaning to her life, Pixabay.
The woman seems to decide that her time and energy should not be spent on
an event that happened more than a thousand years ago and which exists now
only in "silent shadows and in dreams?" (line 3). Why not enjoy "the
comforts of the sun, / In pungent fruit and bright, green wings" of her
apartment on this beautiful Sunday morning (lines 4–5)?
By contrasting the beauty and sensual pleasures of the apartment with the
cold, dark silence of Christian belief, the speaker of the poem suggests that
the answer is obvious and that the pleasure we take in our ordinary
experience of the world and the emotions we feel as a response to them
should be "cherished like the thought of heaven" (line 8).
Stanza III
In the third stanza, the speaker of the poem goes on to compare the belief that
there is something sacred or divine in the world as we experience it to ancient
Greek polytheism. The speaker describes "Jove," better known as Zeus," in
the clouds" who "moved among us, as a muttering king," even
"commingling" with humanity and fathering demigod children (lines 1–5).
The speaker informs us that humans learned to see themselves or their
"blood" in the stars from such mythology (lines 6–8). The speaker of the
poem wonders whether "our blood" is also up to this task of becoming "the
blood of paradise" or of the gods' (lines 9–10).
In ancient Greek mythology, the gods simply lived on the top of a very high
mountain, Olympus, and often came down to and interacted with the world
and with humanity. The speaker of the poem is not suggesting we go back to
believing in the gods of ancient Greece. The suggestion is rather that we see
the earth itself as an enchanted place with spiritual significance. If we see the
earth as "all of paradise that we shall know," we can give new meaning to our
lives and the world that surrounds us (lines 10–11).
Polytheism: the belief, common in the ancient world, that more than one
God exists. In the Greek tradition, the gods were human-like, often coming to
the earth and meddling in human affairs. Polytheism can be contrasted with
the monotheism of religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These
religions believe in a single god who is typically abstract and distinct from
human beings.
Stanzas IV and V
The poem then returns to the unnamed woman, who decides that she is
"content" with the "sweet questionings" of birds chirping and singing before
they fly away (Stanza IV, lines 1–4). But when these birds do fly away, there
seems to be nothing in their absence to tide us over – no prophecy, no
resurrection, no heaven or hell that can console us once they're gone (Stanza
IV, lines 6–11). We still remember certain beautiful experiences and desire to
have them again. We want, as the woman puts it, "some imperishable bliss"
that we can always return to (Stanza V, line 2). The poem's speaker assures
us that "death is the mother of beauty" and that our contentment with the
world depends in an important way on our knowledge that it will end
someday.
Stanza VI
The speaker contrasts this with the traditional ideas of paradise or heaven,
where "ripe fruit never fall" and where there are "rivers like our own that
seek for seas / They never find" (lines 2, 5–6). There would be nothing
special or exciting about a fruit that was forever available, and a river that
never finds an outlet into the sea is literally aimless, meandering to no
destination at all. Everything would feel pointless and boring in a world
without death.
Stanza VII
The speaker then gives a haunting image of a "ring of men" chanting in the
forest on a summer morning, their natural surroundings taking on a spiritual
significance as they show a "boisterous devotion to the sun, / not as a god,
but as a god might be," their voices entering a "windy lake" as the "trees, like
serafin, and echoing hills" surround them (lines 1–10). They seem to
represent what a religion of the earth might look like, where human "blood"
is seen as a part of the sky and the landscape, and where there is a "heavenly
fellowship" between "men that perish and of summer morn" (lines 12–13).
Stanza VIII
Returning once more to the woman in her room, we find her thoughts have
again returned to Christianity and the "tomb in Palestine," which is now
described as the "grave of Jesus" rather than a place where any "spirits"
inhabit (lines 2–4). As the poem opens with an image of the morning sun
shining into the woman's apartment, it closes with an image of the sun setting
in the wilderness.
The setting sun not only highlights the beauty of the scenery but suggests that
the woman's thoughts about religion, like the day, have reached their
conclusion. The woman has decided that the world in all its splendor is
enough and that religion is not necessary for her to live a meaningful life. The
poem closes with images of deer, quail, and berries in a forested mountain, as
"casual flocks of pigeons" fly into the evening darkness, making "Ambiguous
undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness on extended wings" (lines
5–15).
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens
Symbolism
Symbolism is when something represents or stands for something else. Since
"Sunday Morning" is about how we can find meaning in the world, it is, in a
sense, a poem about the possibility of symbolism. The poem contains many
symbols, the most significant of which are repeated throughout the poem: the
sun, silence, birds, and fruit.
Symbolism: when an object, person, or action, stands for or represents
something other than itself, often something larger and more general.
Common examples are a dove representing peace, a rose representing beauty,
or a cross representing Christianity.
The Sun
From the first stanza on (or perhaps even from the Sunday in the poem's title),
the sun is what illuminates and gives comfort to and bathes in light the
woman, cockatoo, coffee, and oranges in the apartment, reflecting the
possibility of a "balm or beauty of the earth" (Stanza 1, line 6).
The mysterious ring of men from Stanza VI performs a kind of sun worship
as they "chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the
sun" (Stanza VI, lines 5-6).
The poem concludes with the realization that "We live in an old chaos of the
sun, / Or old dependency of day and night" as birds fly into the evening
darkness (Stanza VIII, lines 5-6).
The sun symbolizes not just comfort and beauty but also the possibility
of meaning itself. The sun illuminates and gives life, but we know that the
night, like death, will always come, and this is what makes the transcendent
beauty that gives the world meaning possible. It is the anticipation of death,
Stevens tells us, that "makes the willow shiver in the sun," communicating
fear, excitement, and beauty all at once (Stanza V, line 10).
Silence
Silence is repeatedly used to symbolize the ineffectiveness of traditional
Christian religious beliefs.
As the woman thinks about the church, she is reminded of "the holy hush of
ancient sacrifice" and of the crucifixion as a "procession of the dead, /
Winding across wide water, without sound" in "silent Palestine" (Stanza I,
lines 5, 10–11, 14). Religion no longer speaks to her, and it is incapable of
giving her life meaning.
Birds
Birds are heavily loaded with potential symbolic meaning ranging from love
and expressiveness to freedom and eternity. For Stevens, birds symbolize
the transient beauty of the natural world.
This is evident in the "green freedom" and "bright, green wings" of the
cockatoo that help spark the woman's reflections on meaning and religion
(Stanza I, lines 3, 9). It recurs mid-way through the poem when the woman
tells us in her own words that the world as it exists is enough to make her
happy, that she is "content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the
reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings" (Stanza IV, lines 1–3).
When these birds fly away, it is their absence that provokes thoughts of death
and absence, leading her to question where, once they "are gone, and their
warm fields / Return no more, where, then, is paradise?" (Stanza IV, lines 4–
5).
The poem also concludes with an image of "casual flocks of pigeons" flying
into the darkness, their absence and the disappearance of the sun taking on
new beauty and significance (Stanza VIII, lines 13–15).
The green cockatoo is an important symbol of worldly beauty in the poem,
Pixabay.
Fruit
Fruit is traditionally a symbol of wealth and abundance but also
(especially in the Christian context) of temptation and sin. Stevens plays
off of this symbolism, making fruit a complex symbol in this poem.
Oranges, along with coffee and the green cockatoo, are one of the items that
initially cause the woman in the poem to start reflecting on the inadequacy of
religious belief. It is the knowledge of the inevitability of death that "causes
boys to pile new plums and pears / On disregarded plate," or in other words,
engages us with the things of this world (Stanza V, lines 13-14).
In contrast, the constant presence of fruit in paradise renders the world boring
and meaningless. We would no longer bother to decorate the endlessly
flowing river banks in paradise with pear trees or "spice the shores with odors
of the plum" if we took for granted that it would always be there (Stanza VI,
lines 8–9).
The "sweet berries" that "ripen in the wilderness" are also an important part
of the poem's concluding image (Stanza VIII, line 11).
Berries appear in the final stanza as a symbol of the pleasures that the earth
can offer us, Pixabay.
Fruit helps to tempt the woman away from traditional religious beliefs
analogous to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. However, unlike in the
story of Adam and Eve, the woman ends up affirming life and the world,
regaining a lost paradise instead of being expelled from it.
The seasonality of fruit, along with the fact that it spoils quickly, also serves
as a reminder that we must take pleasure in the world while we have the
opportunity to. Fruit symbolizes the beauty and pleasure of the natural
world in all its transience.
Sunday Morning Poem Themes
"Sunday Morning" deals with philosophical and religious themes such as the
place of belief in the modern world and the meaning of human life,
beauty, and death.
Religion and Belief
The poem begins by describing a person for whom religious belief no longer
provides meaning and inspiration and suggests (though never directly states)
that this is a situation that we will all find ourselves in at some point.
Neither the speaker of the poem nor the unnamed woman whose thoughts the
poem describes directly deny the existence of God or argue for the truth or
falsity of any specific religious belief. Christianity simply does not speak to
the woman and leaves her world dark and quiet. It is only in the richness of
our experiences, of pleasure and pain, warmth and beauty, the flux of days
and seasons, and our awareness that these are limited and transient, that life
can take on meaning. This belief has more affinity with polytheism
or pantheism than with Christianity, though it is distinct from both.
Pantheism: the belief that everything in the universe is a manifestation of
divinity or God.
Beauty and the meaning of life
While rejecting God, eternity, and other traditional religious beliefs as a
source of meaning, "Sunday Morning" locates the meaning of life squarely in
our individual experiences of the world. By being open to the beauty of the
world as we experience it and realizing that we, too, are a part of nature and
that our time on the planet is limited, we can come to understand how
meaningful our lives are and the urgency of engaging with the present.
Death
Death is what allows our experiences to be beautiful and, ultimately,
meaningful. While we naturally wish that happiness could go on forever,
beauty and pleasure, in fact, lose their significance when they are not limited
by time or extent. The religious promise of eternal life and heaven, then,
actually prevents us from fully experiencing the beauty of the world we
inhabit. "Death," as the poem's speaker puts it, "is the mother of beauty"
(Stanza VI, line 3).
Sunday Morning - Key Takeaways
First published in a shortened form in 1915 with an expanded version
in 1923, "Sunday Morning" established Wallace Stevens as a major
poet of American Modernism.
"Sunday Morning" explores the thoughts of an unnamed woman
lounging at home on a Sunday on religion and the meaning of life.
The woman and the poem's speaker (it is unclear whether they are the
same voice or not) reject traditional religious beliefs and affirm the
experience of beauty as the only real source of a meaningful life.
The speaker concludes that death plays a central role in our
experience of beauty and meaning.
The poem is rich in symbolism, with the sun being a particularly
important symbol of beauty, life, and meaning.
What is the central idea of the poem "Sunday Morning"?
The central idea of the poem is that a meaningful life is possible in the absence
of religious belief. For life to be meaningful, we have to accept the permanence
and inevitability of death and experience the beauty of the world we live in.
What are the significant themes in Wallace Stevens'
poem, "Sunday Morning"?
"Sunday Morning" takes up philosophical and religious themes such as the place
of belief in the modern world, the meaning of life, death, and beauty.
What is Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning" about?
"Sunday Morning" is about a woman at home alone on, as the title suggests, a
Sunday morning. While enjoying her coffee and oranges, her thoughts wander to
religion and the meaning of life. The poem explores her thoughts about how life
can be meaningful without religion.
What is the woman in Wallace Stevens' "Sunday
Morning" contemplating?
The woman is contemplating how her life can be meaningful in the absence of
God or an afterlife.
When did Wallace Stevens write "Sunday Morning"?
"Sunday Morning" was first published in a shortened form in 1915, and later in
its full form in 1923. It was written at some point before 1915.
