Sunday Morning

Analysis of Sunday Morning

Stanza by Stanza 1 - 4

Stanza 1

An unusual opening for an unusual poem. That first word sets the initial tone for what is a simply titled yet multi-layered poem. It's the sabbath day, day of rest, and there's something in the air.

Someone is dressed in a light morning gown (peignoir, a French word), enjoying coffee and oranges in the sun, in the company of a cockatoo. A scene painted so vividly by Stevens.

But what could the holy hush of ancient sacrifice be? And that old catastrophe, what does that mean? These are references to Christianity and the death of Christ on the cross.

Here we have the speaker setting up the tension between the woman who begins to doze off into dream, and the (her) religion which she still has an interest in, despite her lapsed condition.

There is a subtle allusion to Christ walking on water in the latter part of this first stanza, as she dreams, her mind going off to Palestine, the Holy Lands, where Christ was crucified and buried in a tomb (sepulchre).

The stanza is made up of four sentences, each one containing language either of a natural or religious kind....coffee, oranges, cockatoo, water....sacrifice, procession of the dead, blood and sepulchre.

And the overall tone is that of quiet - hush, calm, without sound, Stilled, silent. The woman is affected by her feelings as the religious impulses gather strength.

Stanza 2

But fundamental questions start to arise within. That word bounty means generosity or lots given willingly - the old religion is demanding, of her life. But why should she sacrifice that for a shady sense of divinity?

There is doubt sown in the shadows and dreams, the intangible, the supernatural. Is it not possible that the real world she is a part of holds Things to be cherished pertaining to the divine?

Nature elicits the deepest feelings in humans; why not become one with the natural world, accept the highs and lows of emotional life, the mundane beauty that has to be experienced if we're to live full lives.

The speaker is acting in the manner of the woman's conscience, suggesting to her that divinity lies within her own psyche; she is an individual living on earth and has a tangible connection to it.

But the last line of this stanza is a little puzzling because it implies that all of the pleasures and pains she'll have to go through will affect her soul. Soul. But just what is the soul in the context of this poem?

Looking at the language of this stanza gives us a clue: bounty, Passions, moods, Grievings, Elations, Emotions, pleasures, pains....

Soul is the collective emotional nature of who we are as humans. Faith, hope and belief stem from this irrational side.

Stanza 3

This stanza outlines a history of the religious god, beginning with Jove, the Roman god of the sky (aka Jupiter) who controlled thunder and lightning and was vital to the orderly running of society at all levels.

Crucially, Jove had no human birth, unlike Jesus who was born of a virgin into a society (at that time in Bethlehem) ruled by the invading Romans. That birth was of course witnessed by the three kings following a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn - the star.

The speaker then asks three vital questions concerning the blood (the human life force) and its future state of being. Will humanity fizzle out or could it envision a paradise on earth, an existence free of supernatural aspiration?

The speaker goes on to imply that this new paradise will enable humankind to come together in a shared world through love. The dividing and indifferent blue that is, the sky, the divine idea, the divine order, will change because the gods will no longer live separately there.

Stanza 4

As if listening to the speaker's argument, the woman makes a kind of reply which morphs into a question, there to be answered by the speaker again. This stanza becomes a dialogue, similar to Yeats's dialogues of the soul, that carries on for the remainder of the poem.

She describes how content she is watching and listening to birds in a field but once they're gone she questions whether observation is enough to restore that ideal. Can human senses, experiencing nature, ever replace or compensate for a disappearing concept of paradise?

The speaker's answer essentially pits the whole of mythology, ideas about the afterlife, the Elysian fields et al against nature as reality (April's green) and says that the latter is more enduring.

There's a romantic feel to some of these lines - the last two for example - whilst the lines:

Neither the golden underground, nor isle

Melodious, where spirits gat them home,

are ironic in tone, the speaker insisting that her remembered experiences will prevail over any that are supernatural.

Analysis of Sunday Morning Stanza by Stanza 5 - 8

Stanza 5

The dialogue continues, with the woman expressing the need for an immortal reward in heaven. To live forever is a longing hard to nullify.

To counteract this the speaker describes the natural cycles of change that exist within life, starting with a famous poetic phrase that some think makes this poem a great one.

Death is the mother of beauty is a basic truth of nature according to the speaker. The seed lives, the seed dies and from it springs new growth and new life. From willow trees to plums and pears and humans, change is the beauty and it refreshes all.

The mention of maidens and boys harks back to the romantic scenery of pastoral and countryside landscapes, idyllic pictures of yore.

Stanza 6

This stanza asks if change occurs in paradise, does death occur in paradise? The speaker suggests that there is stasis; that the supernatural brings stagnation for humans because it is set. There is deception and false hope because there is no sea for the rivers to flow into.

With the idea that beauty comes from (an acceptance of a final) death there is some mystery retained in this natural flux because there are imperfections which make us wonder.

Stanza 7

Now the speaker outlines a vision of what could be, an alternative to the rituals of supernatural religion, a new faith in effect.

This new faith shall be natural - this stanza is full of natural imagery: the sun, sky, windy lake, trees, hills, dew...and within this imagined landscape stands a ring of men, chanting. William Wordsworth might well have joined the same group.

When you think about a ring of men, a circle, the obvious connection is to a ring of stones, a stone circle, as used by the ancients, the pagans, in their worship of the sun and stars.

But Stevens tempers this with religious/biblical language, as if to suggest that the change will come only gradually as the old faith in the Christian gods dies out.

There will be an intimate knowledge of each death and each birth - everything will be renewed, fresh.

·         The word seraphin (often written seraphim but Stevens used the French version) comes from seraph, a Hebrew word which in the old testament refers to six winged angel-like creatures that surround the throne of God.

And the line That choir among themselves long afterward is a little bit odd because Stevens uses choir as a verb. Typical of him to experiment with language.

Stanza 8

The woman hears a voice - a biblical voice perhaps, like the voice of John the Baptist who cried out in the wilderness Make straight the way of the Lord.....only here in this final stanza the prophecy means something entirely different.

Here endeth the supernatural, where no spirits linger. Here is the tomb of the one they called Jesus.

The speaker concludes - we're still influenced by the old religions and their gods; they bring chaos, they isolate, we cannot yet escape them.

Note the final seven lines, which paint an idyllic shifting landscape full of animals and birds. Are they symbols or are we to take them literally? Are they part of the fictional fabric that Stevens suggested should take the place of the old belief in the supernatural?

'….the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.'

Ambiguity reigns to some degree with this poem, which is an advantage for such a mammoth subject. The woman perhaps remains torn between a need for pleasure and a need to know that the imperishable bliss is still attainable.

What Are The Literary/Poetic Devices In Sunday Morning?

Alliteration

When two or more words are close together and start with the same consonant they are said to alliterate. For the reader this brings added texture and interest. There are several examples occurring throughout this poem.

A selection:

holy hush/winding across wide water/balm or beauty/part of pain/Downward to darkness.

Assonance

When two or more words in close alliance have the same sounding vowels. For example:

green freedom/calm darkens/rang its brassy

Enjambment

When a line runs on into the next with no punctuation but maintaining sense it is said to be enjambed. The reader is encouraged to flow on into the next line taking hardly a pause.

There are many enjambed lines in this poem. For example:

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

Simile

The trees, like seraphin

The day is like wide water

Sunday Morning and Blank Verse - Analysis of Meter (Metre in British English)

Sunday Morning is written in blank verse, which traditionally has lines of iambic pentameter and does not rhyme. Shakespeare used it quite often in his plays, and Milton chose this form for his long epic poem Paradise Lost.

Stevens split his poem into eight stanzas, each with fifteen lines. The syntax, that is the way clauses and grammar work together, is often demanding, so the rhythms tend to vary throughout.

Let's take a close-up look at some lines which are of particular interest rhythmically:

Compla / cencies / of the / peignoir, / and late

Coffee / and or / anges / in a sun / ny chair,

This is not orthodox blank verse! The steady rhythmic iambs are subdued initially in that first line by a double pyrrhic (no stress on the syllables) reflecting the relaxed nature of the woman.

The second line, with its extra syllable/beat (11 syllables) starts off with a trochee which is an inverted iamb. Note the pyrrhic and the anapaest - softening, rising.

Here we have a mix of feet which makes for varied rhythm. These two opening lines set the scene for the rest of the poem which rarely delivers a purely iambic pentameter line:

Why should / she give / her boun / ty to / the dead?

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P.S. Notes assembled and made with the help of book and internet sources.

Link : https://owlcation.com/humanities/Analysis-of-Poem-Sunday-Morning-by-Wallace-Stevens