| Lindsay Kaplan ENG 67b Professor Morrison November, 2003 She Says (God Knows What It's Like To Be Dead) Wallace Stevens' poem, "Sunday Morning," argues the ridiculousness of religion through its word choice, structure, dialogue, allusions and direct references.� Stevens proves that religion is a useless concept created by men to be imposed on society in order for people to gain a better understanding of life and death.� However, this ideology actually robs society of the true meaning of living and replaces it with fallacies that Stevens reveals as foolish sophisms.� He extends his ideas about religion's foibles through a journey into the mind of a woman and an all-knowing echo of her subconsciousness that answers many of her questions without ever directly addressing her. The poem is based around the thought process of a woman who chooses to relax outside one beautiful morning that is as colorful as a Matisse painting with its "coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / and the green freedom of a cockatoo" (2-3).�� The significance of the title is obvious because it makes clear to the reader that the scenario is occurring on the biblical Sabbath, the day of rest.� Ironically, she is indeed resting by lounging outside, rather than worrying and praying to a god whom she questions the existence of.� Although her peignoir from the first line of the poem calls attention to the blatant paganism of her sacrilegious rest, she appears to be deep in meditative contemplation.� Rather than attending church, she indulges in the self-satisfaction and sensuous comforts of a luxurious dressing gown and tropical atmosphere.� Her "complacancies of the peignoir" (1) are juxtaposed against "the holy hush of ancient sacrifice" (5), which is representative of the crucifixion as well as the consumption of wafer and wine that she would be partaking in if she had gone to church.� The contented woman "dreams a little, and she feels the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe" (6-7).� As she begins to nap outside, the bright images of sunshine and oranges are immediately replaced with darkness symbolic of her religious qualms.� Suddenly, the oranges and the green wings seem like things "in procession of the dead, / Winding across the wide water, without sound" (10-11).� She connects the vibrancy of the living pleasures with their inherent expiration date.� Both the oranges and the bird are ultimately moribund, destined to travel across the figurative River Styx that the water makes reference to.� "The day," she notices, "is like wide water, without sound" (12), realizing that the sky has no choice but to darken and for time to progress along regardless of any situation.� Her dreams take her deep into thoughts of Christianity, specifically "to silent Palestine" (14), where even the son of god succumbed to his own mortality and was buried in a cave.� Even when she is away from the religious confines of a church, the guilty thoughts creep upon her own questioning reasoning which unfolds into an internal struggle. Stevens chooses to describe a female�s introspection for multiple reasons.� In Jungian psychology, the anima isboth the unconscious, or true inner self, of an individual and the feminine inner personality as present in the unconscious of the male. The commonly used phrase "mother earth" often associated the earth with feminine attributes while the sky is related to a masculine persona typically corresponding with both the Christian and ancient gods. Similarly, Stevens later personifies death itself as not just a woman, but a mother figure.� Though death is often depicted as a hooded man with a sickle, he creates an image of death as a woman giving birth to the inherent beauty of the world.� Whatever skeptical thoughts are obvious to the reader through the woman's unobservant attitude are confirmed in the second stanza.� A voice is introduced that represents the woman's alter-ego that confirms the rationalizing for her lazy day.�� Never grounded in the poem with quotations or pronouns, the reader must infer that this voice is a masculine subconscious persona of the character, or the woman's Jungian animus.� The word also encompasses a deep, underlying sense of animosity that the voice surely exemplifies towards the idea of religion.� The reason for the noticeable cynicism is never made clear, although the disgust is clear through the voice's explanation. The voice of reason enters and asks two important questions that account for the woman's skeptical feelings towards religion. "Why should she give her bounty to the dead? / What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams?" (16-18) She is apparently defensive of her own indulgence and contented satisfaction of being alive on her own. The woman refuses to give her precious thoughts, the true essence of herself that she can honestly believe in, to the dead by worshipping saints who had achieved martyrdom through their own sacrificial means.� It would be much more understandable to find comfort in the life that surrounds her, such as the sun, "pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else /��� . . . any balm or beauty of the earth" (20-21).� It is illogical to exalt that which no longer exists when there are such things surrounding her that should "be cherished like the thought of heaven" (22).� The voice explains that religion devotes itself to preparing oneself for the after world, or heaven.� There is no way of knowing that heaven is promised to her when she dies, so she should be enjoying the heaven she has on the earth while she is alive.� "Divinity must live within herself" (23) because without the idea of religion, there is no higher power to worship but her own life.� Her mortality is, in its own right, divine and godlike.� Her memories and emotions such as, "Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; / Grieving in loneliness, or unsubdued / Elations when the forest blooms" (24-26) are more real than the supposed afterlife that one lives their entire life anticipating and making allowances for.� Even "gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the winter branch" (26-29) are much more profound to a human than the idea of heaven or a paradise that does not have any proof of existence.� The enjambment of the phrase "gusty emotions" allows for a break of thought between the phrase that adds to the feeling of a strong wind.� The voice supposes that, "these are the measures destined for her soul" (30).� The voice insists that the woman realizes that life comes with the inevitable promise of death.� Because she is mortal, she has no choice but to find paradise, or heaven, in herself.� To be alive is divine, though brief.� Even in its brevity lies the beauty and truth associated with ideas of god. The third stanza reveals the voice's frustration with the stories that religion preaches as truth and explains the inevitable retreat of religion in society.� Although the woman is spending her Sunday avoiding from a congregation, she is a cultural anomaly.� Eventually, the speaker, in the form of the masculine amanus voice, explains the reasons that religion ironically alienates its devotees.� The speaker explains that "Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. / No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave / Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind" (31-33).� The singsong alliteration adds to the fictive nature of the unbelievable creation.� The ancient Roman god of all other gods was born from the sky, but he remained separate from the earth that man is bound to.� Jove was not born from the womb of a woman, yet from the minds of men who needed to create a higher being to explain their own rise to existence.� Jove, or Jupiter, is etymologically defined as "sky father," a fairly inadequate explanation for man�s own undefinable birth.� The idea of Jove was that the ancient god, "moved among us, as a muttering king / Magnificent, would move among his hinds."� This god remained separate from man, alienating and separating mortals from the divine.� Jove was born from the mind of man, "Until our blood, commingling, virginal, / With heaven, brought such requital to desire / The very hinds discerned it, in a star" (36-38).� The notion of a faceless, almighty god was replaced with the more tangible deity of Christ, whose convenient fate absolved mankind of all sin and despair.� Still, this new deity was born to the Virgin Mary from the sky, an inhuman creation that distances mankind from the sky.� Stevens demystifies the myth of Christ in order to prove that it is merely a story to satisfy human desires of meaning.� The speaker goes on to demand of the reader, "Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise?" (39-40).�� He relates a major theme of the poem by establishing the possibility of paradise existing on earth and if human blood is worthy of becoming the new divinity.� After all, Paganism was once replaced by the ancient Roman gods, who were then replaced with the face of the son of god.� The speaker believes that religion is destined to break down and again yield a human sky that "will be much friendlier then than now" (42) for it will no longer be, "this dividing and indifferent blue" (45) that alienates man from paradise. |