Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”, as many of his poems,
combines almost austerely complex intellectual puzzles and abstract tone with
sensuous and striking imagery. Written in unrhymed iambic pentameter, it uses a
mixture of strong concrete words with polysyllabic abstractions, to give
theological conundrums, as it were, a local habitation and a name. As the title
suggests, a Sunday Morning is normally associated with church-going, but the female
protagonist of the poem is observing nature rather...
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critical appreciation of WALLACE STEVEN'S
In the first stanza, a complacent woman lounges in her
dressing gown late into a Sunday morning, eating a leisurely breakfast and
enjoying the vivid, vibrant beauty of the natural world around her. She takes
great pleasure in her coffee and oranges, her mood reflected by the “sunny”
chair and the cockatoo that has been released onto the rug. She is spending a
morning at home instead of going to church. The reference to the “holy hush of
ancient sacrifice” suggests that the day is Easter Sunday. Initially, the pull
of the natural world dissipates the traditional power this day has over the
woman, as she has chosen not to take part in Christian rituals. However, as she
dreams, the pleasure she experiences this morning is soon extinguished by “the
dark encroachment of that old catastrophe,” a reference to the crucifixion of
Christ. She recognizes that the secular beauty she appreciates is not eternal,
and so the colorful oranges and parrot, earlier appearing so full of life, now
“seem things in some procession of the dead.”
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