Jennifer Hilpert
Dr. Douglas Rowlett
English 2328
06 Jul 2008
Exam 2
Sunday Morning, one of the poems in Wallace Stevens Harmonium, has been singled out
as one of his most eloquent poems. Stevens wrote the first version of the poem in 1914, which
was published by Poetry the next year. Stevens made considerable changes, especially to the
ending, by the time he put it in Harmonium.
Some major themes covered in Sunday Morning are belief and doubt and death and
life. Belief and doubt follows the entire poem, making it the most prominent of the themes.
Death and life is the speakers strongest argument as to how the woman can celebrate nature,
although it contains death. The speakers says, Death is the mother of beauty, insisting that the
fact of death enhances beauty. By the end of the poem, the woman determines that a devotion to
earthly pleasures and not the dead religion of the past will provide her with divine bliss.
The woman in the poem moves back and forth between belief and doubt as she enters
into a conversation with the poet about spiritual fulfillment. In the beginning of the poem, she
appears to be content in her newfound appreciation of the earthly pleasures of the natural world.
This world with its vivid colors and leisurely breakfasts offers her a sense of freedom in the time
she allows herself to appreciate the bounty of nature. Soon, however, doubt over the choice of
not going to church has ruined her serenity. As she appreciates the nature, she starts to experience
a growing awareness and dread of its transitory nature. As a result, she becomes filled with
spiritual anxiety to the point that she begins to believe that a reversion to Christian rituals and
dogma will lead to salvation. The woman struggles to maintain her belief in Christian rituals
even as the speaker tries to convince her to continue to place her spiritual fulfillment in the
natural world. She wonders whether earth will seem all of paradise that we shall know
especially given its impermanence. Nature fills her with contentment, yet she asks, When the
birds are gone, and their warm fields return no more, where, then, is paradise? She continually
resists the poets promotion of a spiritual connection to nature, insisting, I still feel the need of
some imperishable bliss, which she had found in a Christian vision of eternity. The speaker
never wavers from his assertion that she must find divinity within herself, and that this can only
be accomplished through a communion with nature. By meeting each question with an
imaginative yet logical response, the speaker slowly convinces her to doubt her old beliefs in the
divinity of traditional religion. By the end of the poem, she has returned to the position she held
at the beginning, again aligning herself with the freedom of birds, unsponsored in her
attachment to her natural world.
The speakers strongest argument for the woman to devote herself to an intense
relationship with nature comes in the form of an examination of death and life. He continually
associates Christianity and the religions of the past with death. In the first stanza, he notes the
darkness of that old catastrophe, the crucifixion of Christ, and of the dominion of the blood
and sepulchre, the important Christian ritual of communion where believers drink the blood and
eat the body of Christ. The woman has much trouble with the thought of nature being so
beautiful since all that is in nature dies, but the speaker finds death in the standing nature of
heaven where ripe fruit never falls and the boughs hang always heavy in that perfect sky. The
speaker points out that a celebration of nature, by contrast, is a celebration of life, even as he
acknowledges its cyclical patterns of death and rebirth. He argues that the very fact of inevitable
change fills the present with a stronger sense of vibrancy and poignancy. Thus, this form of
death is the mother of beauty and so should be accepted as a crucial part of an appreciation of
the moment.
Death is the mother of beauty. What is a mother? Is it something that protects and
nourishes like a mother, or perhaps the cause, source, or origin of something? In this sentence it
could be both. Death perpetuates beauty, causing it to repeat itself over and over again. Without
death what is left of nature just stays old and ugly and suffering. Death is the mother of beauty is
protects the old and weak (ugliness) and causes beauty by getting rid of the ugliness, which lets
us enjoy the true beauty of life. The woman can find spiritual fulfillment in that.
The ending stanza, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
ambiguous undulations as they sink, downward to darkness, on extended wings, shows the
uncertainty in of the woman choice to remain content with nature. Ambiguous undulations, or
uncertain waves, can show the womans uncertain movements between nature and Christianity,
which also ties into the theme of belief and doubt. Sinking into a downward darkness shows two
negatives, sinking and darkness, which shows that she defiantly thinks that her choice could have
been wrong. The birds are her choice, and the darkness the bad place in which she could end up
because of it.
In conclusion, through the themes of belief and doubt, and death in life, the woman in
Sunday Morning goes on a journey to find spiritual fulfillment, which in the end with the help of
the speaker, her faith remains in nature.
