| The poem returns to the girl's thoughts, who says in the fourth stanza, "'I am content when wakened birds, / Before they fly, test the reality / Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings.'" Obviously, she finds simple pleasure from small, temporal occurrences that are found in nature. "'But,''' she continues, '''when the birds are gone, and their warm fields / Return no more, where, then, is paradise?''' (46-50) Paradise is not just the beauty of the birds and the sky, but the ability to comprehend the way that beauty touches and affects her. The voice refutes the fantastical myths associated with religious belief. "There is not any haunt of prophesy" (51) that can "endure / as April's green endures." The problem with religious belief is not a problem of proof of disproof, but rather a decision, which like other human decisions, must be made separately by the individual in the absence of conclusive evidence. Religious faith is counterintuitive, for the truly faithful must admit that religion is irrational and unfounded. Such religious stories like "any old chimera of the grave / ... the golden underground" (52-53) or the idea of heaven, "melodious, where spirits gat them home" (54) are foolish to worship as truth when there are beautiful realities in the world that we know are true. None of these false images will last any longer than men themselves. She must live in reality without the safety net of god's heaven. Religion's god is an empty myth that cannot satisfy her the way immediate reality can. The divine beauty must reside within her own memories of her own existence, such as "her remembrance of awakened birds, / Or her desire for June and evening, tipped / By the consummation of the swallow's wings" (58-60). The birds that make her happy depend on their transience to affect her for the present is subjugated to the past. However, she is still not fully satisfied by this happiness, for she admits in the fifth stanza, '''But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss.''' Even when she is perfectly content, such as her leisurely Sunday morning contemplation, she still craves something eternal. Man created god to fill this empty void that allows for a personal connection to a universe otherwise vacant of comprehensible meaning. However, if one loses faith in god, there is no other choice but to find one's own mortality divine and godlike. ''Death is the mother of all beauty'' (63), for without the ultimate transience of death, beauty would not be able to exist. Death is feminine, like the earth, for it gives birth to the beauty that would not exist without the promise of death's transience. ''From her / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires'' (63-65) for death is necessary to comprehend bliss, even though it ''strews the leaves / Of sure obliteration on our paths'' (65-66). As an example, the voice narrates a story of a maternal death continually beautifying the world: She makes the willow shiver in the sun For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet. She causes boys to pile new plums and pears On disregarded plate. The maidens taste And stray impassioned in the littering leaves. 70-75 Stevens personifies the weeping willow so that it may acknowledge the maidens' mortality while they live upon the living grass under the living tree. The ripe fruit gathered on the disregarded plate refers to the desuetude that encompasses things that one disregards after they are no longer desired as they were in the past. Therefore, death releases and renews life on earth. Without death, the world would be in a perpetually dying, stagnant stasis of decay. Religion makes room for death by suggesting that life is only prologue. Stevens suggests that life itself is paradise, and the fear of death is exactly what allows life to replace heaven. Ironically, beauty is dependent on death, or the emotionally ugly, to exist. The Christian view of heaven is unrealistic because it does not answer the question posed by the voice: ''Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?'' (76-77). Frozen perfection does not leave room for change. If all one ever knows is inert beauty, there is no scale by which a comparison may be made. The heaven that is said to be ''so like our perishing earth, / With rivers like our own that seek for seas / They never find, the same receding shores / That never touch with inarticulate pang?'' (79-82). A river cannot flow without change, nor can the crash of water exist without the movement of the water. The possibility of change does not exist in the fictitious paradise that religion preaches, but in the life that they conceive in the present. People constantly contemplate the disorder of the world and the certainty of their own impending death. They are no longer rescued from this potentially tragic situation by religion, but by the use of imagination. Imagination can denote meaning to the chaos of reality and can also help one to discover beauty in nature and joy in the face of death. Because Stevens believed that only the imagination can make sense of the universe, he expresses that if there is a god, god and the imagination are one and the same. The seventh stanza moves from a Christian view of heaven to a somewhat pagan society that chooses to worship the sun in place of a sky deity. They are ''supple and turbulent, a ring of men'' (91) that ''chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun'' (92-93). Reminiscent of Yeats�s apocalyptic ''The Second Coming,'' this image of a godless world deprives man of consolations, yet this possibly bleaker life is empty of sophistry and myth. The seemingly primitive orgy of worship expressed through the diction of these lines projects an image of men becoming one with nature. Rather than pray silently to a silent, intangible god, the voice concludes that paying homage to the great, natural sun is a more fulfilling and sufficient belief. It is glorious and freeing to have faith in the sun, ''Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a savage source'' (94-95). The sun, as brilliant, uncultivated and powerful as it may be, is not an exception to death's rules. When people learn to worship the sun, a representative of nature over myth, ''their chant shall be a chant of paradise, / Out of their blood, returning to the sky'' (96-97). The sky that estranged the Christian god from god's worshippers will no longer be such a dividing metaphor that isolates and removes the living from the paradise of the gods in the third stanza. Instead, this new divinity shall join together heaven and earth. This relates back to the theme in stanza three, when the voice of reason asks ''Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise?'' (39-40). Paradise is able to exist on earth because human blood is worthy of becoming the new divinity. Man will have to find their present day saints and martyrs amongst the ''the trees, like serafin'' (100) and the touch of god upon their own imagination as they depend on their own memories and the transience of beauty rather than an eternal lie. With the happiness of this temporal bliss comes the promise of their own death, for ''whence they came and whither they shall go / The dew upon their feet shall manifest'' (104-105). Accepting their own death without the construction of a veil of religious sovereignty makes the world which they live in richer, their life more meaningful than those who live in pursuit of the next. The number of stanzas are significant when recognizing the religious context of this poem. According to the bible, the Christian god created the world we know in six days and took the seventh to rest. The eighth stanza is heretic in sense that the poem could end at the seventh with the idea of deconstructing of god and worshipping the natural beauty of tangible reality. Rather than ending his poem where the biblical god ended the week, Stevens continues by finally allowing the woman's subconscious animus to call out to her as she thinks. She hears upon that silent water that had washed over her like waves of guilt, "a voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay." The idea of god is retreating, for it is not a hidden deity that waits in Christ�s final resting spot, but a deceased god that is slowly losing his religious impact on mankind. The voice then opens up the poem by extending the traces of the skeptical woman's thoughts to the reader with a collective pronoun. We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. 110-113 Mankind is unwittingly intertwined in nature and in death yet always feel a sense of isolation. Death introduces an element of mortality that makes it difficult to accept and to not suffer from personal existential nausea. The speaker returns to a cyclical description of life, devoid of any biblical references. "Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries" (114- 115), and then makes another allusion to temporal necessity through the imagery of "sweet berries [that] ripen in the wilderness" (116). However, the reader turns back to "the isolation of the sky / At evening" (117-118) to see that the day, too, is victim to a transience that god is never subjected to. The colorful oranges and cockatoo from the woman"s morning relaxation has turned into colorless "casual flocks of pigeons" (118) that make "ambition undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings" (119-120). This final image leaves the reader with a feeling of loss and regret. The polytheistic gods were replaced with the Judeo-Christian monotheistic god which is slowly slipping away from society. Wallace Stevens proves that religion is counterproductive to the original needs of mankind in his poem of the earth, "Sunday Morning," through point of view, well-placed dialogue, structure and biblical allusions. The deconstruction of religion was imminent because it was a product of man�s imagination to begin with. Once the idea of an eternal sky-god that roams through heaven is dispelled, man can learn to appreciate life without the need of sophisms and myths to guide one through. |
| Sunday Morning. cont'd |