Wallace Stevens, it seems, never said much about his poem" Sunday Morning. Because Stevens gives us very little information about his own thoughts, it is important to examine the thoughts of other critics before analyzing a poem such as "Sunday Morning." In an essay titled “Pound/Sevens: Whose Era?” Marjorie Perloff brings together her and other critics' reviews to paint a picture of Stevens's views on religion. She references Lucky Beckett, who says that modernist poets such as Stevens are characterized by the study of "belief and values ​​in a world without established systems of truth" (Perloff 3). Another critic, Walton Litz, is more specific in his characterization of Stevens: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Steven's final world is neither eccentric nor private. It is built on the central reality of our time, the death of the gods and the great coordinating mythologies, and in their place it offers the austere satisfactions of a "me" dependent on the pure poetry of the physical world, a "me" whose terrifying lack of belief is transformed into a source of freedom. (Perloff 3) This idea that Stevens believed that ancient systems of truth, such as Christianity, had failed in the modern world and that people should find freedom and peace in the natural world outside of ancient systems is the underlying theme of his poem “Sunday Morning”. The poem begins with a woman lounging outside on a sunny Sunday morning, instead of being in church, where she should be. She savors small material delights: the delicate feel of her dressing gown, her breakfast of coffee and oranges, and the presence of “the green freedom of a cockatoo / On a carpet” (4). But in addition to providing simple material pleasures, all these things help to “dissipate / The sacred silence of ancient sacrifices” (4-5). This can be interpreted in many ways, but I believe that these simple material pleasures help to diminish the solemnity of the memory of the tragic sacrifice of Jesus; in the presence of such simple and natural joy, this woman is incapable of experiencing the mourning that Christianity provokes in its faithful every Sunday morning in memory of the sacrifice of Jesus. However, despite the small pleasures she experiences, she cannot avoid thinking about the subject. As she lies in the sun, “She dreams a little and she feels the darkness / The encroachment of this old catastrophe” (6-7). She thinks about death and her inevitable meeting to meet him. In the absence of religious faith, how is she supposed to cope with such an inevitable catastrophe? With this worry in mind, “a calm darkens among the lights of the water. / The prickly oranges and the bright green wings / They look like things in a sort of procession of the dead, / Winding on vast waters, without sound” (8-12). Suddenly, facing death, she can no longer feel the same joy she had felt earlier. The day takes on an extremely solemn character, threatening to drown her. Yet his thoughts persist and progress as his dreams move “to silent Palestine, / Domination of blood and grave” (14-15). This is a reference to Jesus Christ and his death in Judea, Palestine. It seems here that it is not the woman's thoughts, but rather the narrator's voice, which refers to the place of Jesus Christ's death as the "Dominion of Blood and Sepulchre." This line, I believe, reveals Stevens's views on Christianity and other religions; although Palestine andtomb are specific references to Christianity, this part of the world is of great importance to many other religions. This line can therefore be interpreted as addressing religion in its entirety. But instead of it being the kingdom of eternal life, which is the belief that all who follow Christianity and most religions hold, it is the dominion of the grave; faith in religion will not lead to eternal life. Saying there is a tomb for Jesus goes against Christian teachings, which claim he was reincarnated and then ascended to heaven. It also seems to play on the sacrament of the Last Supper of taking the blood and body of Christ in the form of wine and bread. By replacing Christ's body with the tomb, Stevens recognizes Jesus not as an immortal divine figure, but as a man who lived and died like any other. The second stanza is the woman's thought process working on the issue of religion. . She begins by wondering why she should worship a figure like Jesus when she knows he is dead. By simply asking this question, she acknowledged that she does not believe He is the Son of God, because she knows He was mortal. She then questions the value of “divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams” (17-18). According to her, the teachings of Christianity and the faith one must have to attain divinity are not real, tangible things, but rather false illusions formed by the mind of man. Instead of the shadows and dreams of religion, she will find comfort and pleasure in nature, and will cherish these things with the same reverence with which those who follow religion cherish "the thought of heaven" (19-22). She then decides that “the Divinity must live in itself” (23). Yet it seems that its essence is somehow linked to nature. The second half of this stanza aligns his moods and experiences with different aspects of the natural world, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that "All pleasures and all pains, remembering / The bough of summer and the bough of winter. / These are the measures intended for his soul” (28-30). This last line is very important, because by evoking the woman's soul, we discern that this is not an argument in favor of atheism. This becomes somewhat paradoxical, because although Stevens has no faith in Christianity (a system of truth that has failed in the modern world), it seems that he still believes in a supernatural human essence. Does he believe that there is a part of us that endures after death? Or does it simply refer to women as they exist in life? Perhaps this will be revealed at the end of the poem. The third stanza seems to leave the woman's thoughts and enter the narrator's mind. It tells for us the process of religious myth creating a closer relationship with gods and man. It begins with Jupiter, whom the Romans believed to be the king of the gods; according to myth, Jupiter was born completely detached from man (31). This refers to the time when man believed that the gods were entities entirely separate from humanity. Over time, religion progressed to the point where the gods “moved among us, as a muttering king, / Magnificent, would move among his hinds” (34-35). As religious beliefs evolved over the centuries, the gods began to have closer relationships with man; this specific line refers to myths about gods mating with humans. Eventually, Christianity was created, and “our blood, mixed, virginal, / With heaven, brought such reward to desire / Even the hinds discerned it, ina star” (36-38). The most popular form of Western religion, Christianity, is the greatest extent to which religion has combined man and God; the worship of Jesus Christ as God in the form of man is the greatest blending of the blood of man and the blood of God that we have ever achieved. The path of religious progression, as the story above demonstrates, has a rational end: the complete unity of God and man. It is with this thought in mind that Stevens asks us: “Will our blood run out? Or will it become / The blood of heaven? And the earth / Will it seem like a whole paradise that we will know? (39-41). Religion continued to fail man to the point that it had to be changed again and again, but with each change, man plays a more important role. Stevens seems to believe that humanity will succeed when we have eliminated God, or fully merged with God, in our religious practices – when we come to view the earth, instead of some other realm, as heaven. Any other end would be a failure on the part of man. He believes that when this happens, "heaven will be much friendlier then than today, / Part labor and part pain, / And then in glory after enduring love, / Not this divisive blue and indifferent” (42-45). ). By removing God from heaven, heaven and all earth will be much more beautiful than they were today. The fourth stanza returns to the woman from the beginning of the poem. As in the first stanza of the poem, the woman rejoices in the presence of nature. She describes a beautiful summer morning scene in which birdsong can be heard through the morning mists of a field. She wonders, however, “When the birds are gone and their warm fields return no more, where will paradise be then?” (49-50). Lines 51-56 reveal that heaven is found nowhere else outside of nature; Stevens lists for us several supernatural places that are considered heaven, but all these beliefs have disappeared in the past; there is none who has “endured / As endures the green of April” (56-57). It then personalizes the natural spiritual experience for the woman; The green of April is a paradise that all can visit, but for her, paradise is "her memory of the waking birds, / Or her desire for June and the evening, inclined / By the consumption of the swallow's wings" ( 58-60). I believe Stevens shows us the vast appeal of nature and how each individual can find their own piece of paradise within their domain. But despite the pleasure and contentment she feels from nature, she still feels "the need for something imperishable." happiness” (62). Next comes what is perhaps the most famous passage in the poem, in which Stevens declares that “Death is the mother of beauty; this is why from her, / Alone, will come the fulfillment of our dreams / And our desires” (63-65). From death comes our fulfillment for imperishable happiness. Through death we can appreciate what is beautiful in the world; if nothing were ever to die, it would become the norm and would be boring and unsatisfying. Because we know that a person or moment will eventually pass away, we are able to fully appreciate it while we have it. The poem continues the theme of death, saying that although death will inevitably take us all, it is death that "makes the willow shiver in the sun / For the maidens who used to sit and to look / On the grass, abandoned at their feet.” . / She leads the boys to pile new plums and pears / On an ignored plate. The young girls taste / And wander passionately over the rubbish leaves” (70-75). It's difficultto decipher, but I believe these lines claim that death is not only the mother of beauty, but also the mother of love; because of death, men and women seek to love each other; without our own mortality, we would not seek comfort from another human being. Perhaps then Stevens is saying that love, derived from the knowledge of death, is the answer to this woman's desire for "imperishable happiness." The sixth stanza presents a picture of heaven as it is most often seen by religion. The common view of religious heaven is a place where one goes after death and where there is no more death. But, according to Stevens, there can be no beauty without death, so a place without death would not be heaven. He presents us with a vision of nature, but an unchanging, non-nurturing vision of the nature that such a "paradise" would contain, a place where ripe fruit would never fall into the hungry mouth of man and where the earth would always look like to nature. ditto, the unchanged shores (77-82). He asks: “Why lay the pear on these river banks / Or perfume the shores with plum smells? (83-84). This is a reference to the love scene described in the previous stanza. In a place like this, we would never die, so we would never seek the “imperishable happiness” of love. This also gives new meaning to the mirrored lines of the previous stanza, because now death has also become the mother of art. Just as we would not love without death, man would have no desire to create new art if there were no death. Men would no longer pile new plums and pears / On a neglected plate – men would no longer renew the same old artistic mediums with the creation of new art. The stanza ends with the reaffirmation that "death is the mother of beauty, mystical, / In whose burning womb we conceive / Our earthly mothers wait, sleepless" (88-90). I believe that the beliefs mentioned here, of a mystical death and our earthly mothers waiting there afterwards, are related to the same belief in traditional religious heaven presented in this stanza; common religious belief, that which was “designed” by man, gives death a mystical element and makes us believe that those we have known await us on the other side. According to Stevens, this is not the case. The seventh stanza opens with an image of what appears to be a pagan ritual. This image seems to be the ideal form of religion that Stevens strove to depict throughout the poem. It is important to note, however, that this is not a return to man's primitive beliefs; men celebrate “their devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / Naked among them, like a wild spring” (93-95). They do not believe that the sun is a powerful and supernatural being; they simply recognize it as the source of the natural world in which they live and love. These men came to recognize that the natural world around them was a paradise (96). And they have reached the final stage of religious progression detailed in the third stanza; the blood of God has been fully fused with them, for they sing “of their blood, returning to heaven” (97); the traditional religious hierarchy of the gods being in the sky and speaking to man has been completely reversed and man now sends his voice to the sky. The next lines follow the voices of the men singing as they travel across the countryside, flooding the land. There is no longer any need for the sky because their "lord", the sun, is reflected in the lake, and the trees are now their angels, "who chorus among themselves long after", singing.