Wallace Stevens Sunday Morning

Death holds such endless fascination to people that it has permeated nearly every aspect of human culture – we write songs about it, strategize when to best trim back our gardens around its inevitability, and even base religions off of how to even slightly evade it. The idea of “something more,” an afterlife, is incredibly important to many people; along with fatality, that is one of the subjects of intense scrutiny of Wallace Stevens’s poem, “Sunday Morning.” “Sunday Morning” brushes on a number of interesting topics (such as male-female relationships, sex, and use of imagery). Unfortunately, throwing out three stanzas of the poem was vital to its initial publication. Stevens chose to ultimately re-arrange the poem to focus on a broader picture …show more content…
The character’s first question of the importance of Jesus’s tomb is at last answered, as a voice says, “’The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.’” Though intertwined with religion, Stevens makes death completely independent from how we seek to interpret (and escape it) in our everyday life. This is seconded by a slow ascension of indifference as the poem closes: “Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; / Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; / And, in the isolation of the sky, / At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” This quote, on which Stevens ends the poem, does tree things. Firstly, it reminds us that no matter how we see death in the world, death and nature remain indifferent to us, inescapably connected to all beauties, balms, and horrors of life as they are. Secondly, the slow fade from the intimacy of “our mountains” to the “darkness” forces us to acknowledge the presence of the unknown in death that remains, even if we acknowledge that death is an inevitable and intrinsic part of the life we so enjoy. Third, the “casual flocks of pigeons” bear a remarkable resemblance to the female character in the poem, who first ponders her own uncertainty in regards to death and the afterlife by exploring “the dark / Encroachment of that old catastrophe.” We will all fly on towards death and the unknown at some point; but like the woman, we can be brave, and walk towards it while fully enjoying the ever-changing life that we possess. By ending the poem with its original stanza, Stevens draws a full circle back to the first stanza,