Final proposal Wallace Stevens \"Sunday Morning\" PDF

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Final paper done on Wallace Stevens' "Sunday Morning"...

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MALIHA HAMDAN FINAL PAPER KAUFMANN ENGH 346

The woman that is the center of Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning” rejects Christianity and the supposed liberation from life it provides. She refuses to let herself belong to it because she cannot connect to it, it does nothing for her and she cannot identify with what Christianity offers. I do not feel that she fears condemnation, or that she lives in fear due to her rejection of the Christian church. She wants “imperishable bliss” but she knows that death is inevitable and that because life is fleeting, because there is no permanency, this is what makes life, and then death so beautiful. Stevens writes that death is the mother of beauty, and the poem speaks to this idea of the fleeting nature of life related to Paganism juxtaposed with what Christianity offerseternal happiness in heaven (that Wallace feels is a sham). Death gives birth to life because it is what makes life worth something, and death provides answers where heaven fails or fall short. Paganism, which Stevens offers in the poem as the alternative to Christianity is present throughout, “Passion of rain, or moods in falling snow;/Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued/ Elations when the forest blooms” so if death overrides and surpasses, destroys, gives life, etc, why does Stevens place such an emphasis on a paganist alternative to Christianity and why is the speaker so concerned with nature if death just consumes all in the end? In Steven’s words which you offered to me for analysis: “The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art is simply this that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel

that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith, the reigning prince.” (The Necessary Angel 170-1). I think what Steven’s is getting at, and what is still painfully relevant today is that people have lost their faith, or have realized that the salvation or safety they have attempted to secure is not tangible, and it is out of grasp. He feels that art and poetry could be used to heal the world, or that it is the only thing mankind can look to for answers at this point. With modernity I feel within it is simply an attempt to understand life and death, and what happens in between, not to say that it even answers these questions, because more often than not I found myself frustrated with the lack of answers I received from the poems. But I do feel that it makes an attempt to provide a clearer and unobstructed view of humanity. The poets we have read and discussed have not been interested in creating more prose involving symbolism to do with flowers and frill, as was made clear to us with the opening act that was “Sea Rose”. I feel that this is the most salient point to consider when we relate it to Sunday Morning, because just as H.D holds up her middle finger to the poetry that came before her, Wallace Stevens, through the woman who acts as the poem’s focal point introduces us to a rejection of Protestantism and an attempt to find beauty and peace within the world she already resides in. The woman in Sunday morning struggles with finding her bliss and salvation. Christianity has failed her because she cannot connect to it. And so the poem begins to veer off into another realm as he sits in her room. Her mind goes to other places, to nature to find her answers. The poem is filled to the brim with constant imagery of nature and paganism. “Shall she not find in comforts of the sun/In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else/In any balm or beauty of earth/Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?” Can’t the woman find her faith in a different place? Why should Christianity be the only route of happiness and peace?

This oddly has me thinking about how math is taught in schools. When the kids get creative and find different ways to solve problems they are reprimanded instead of praised. They are supposed to use this one, specific way to find the answer, even if they have found the exact answer through a different mode. The protagonist in “Sunday Morning” is looking for her answer but she will find it through her own means, she will find it through her discoveries of paganism and nature, and through these she hopes to understand her own mortality. I enjoy the poem and its descriptions of this paganist view of the woman through the speaker, up until the fourth stanza is reached. “I am content when wakened birds/before they fly, test the reality/of misty fields, by their sweet questionings/But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields/Return no more, where, then is paradise?” This is where Steven’s not only loses me, but also seems to punch me in the gut- if only slightly. He has been offering up this salvation in paganism, in the natural world. We have not had to leave or go anywhere to hold on to this religion and believe in it- we have not had to give ourselves away. Then suddenly the birds are flying away and our woman is at a loss. She wants her paradise and I thought that up until this point she was going to get it, but paradise seems to be only an image, an insipid picture of empty beauty that you cannot take with you when you die. “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her/Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/” Death seems to erase all in the end, and if not erase, it seems to override all. So what is Steven’s point in the end? He offers to me this Paganist religion because Protestantism has failed, but then tells me that this alternative too cannot help me in the end. Paganism is supposed to be the world as a form of paradise where simply existing should be enough, but then the birds fly away and take paradise with them. In the end there is only death. Yes, this sounds like a bit of a cop out, but it is the only answer I can see in the poem. Is it that death is the only

truth? It is the only inevitability in life after all, everyone will die. Perhaps this is why death can be so beautiful, because it cannot be escaped, only shortly postponed, and that is why we should appreciate the beauty we see in nature, the “Passions of rain”, the “moods in falling snow”. As we discussed beauty without death, is not beautiful. And if we expand on this we can say that death is what gives life its beautiful aspects. From what I can deduce, Steven’s has offered up different paths of salvation but in the end tells us that death is what remains. So death is inevitable and it is the only truth of life, but I don’t think that Steven’s is showing us this to make us think of darkness and impending doom, I think he is just representing us with the realities of life as he sees them. This is why he feels so strongly about the power of poetry, because here is this beautiful, tangible thing that we can read, and then reread, and hold close to our chests despite death and pain. Death will come and take me but I can’t do anything about that, and I’m not sure I would want to. What I have always liked about poetry is that I have been able to read something filled with pain and rawness and I have seen bits of my own life in it. It’s not that it’s given me my answers, or even told me how to deal with my pain, but it was the fact that it was there in front of me and that I could identify with it that saved me in a bunch of small ways. I did not need my pain to go away, but seeing someone other than myself feel and think and live in the same way provides me with a great amount of comfort. So is this what Steven’s feels about poetry when he tells us that it used to take the place of religion when it fails? I personally think so. Thinking along these lines I cannot be completely upset when Steven’s offers Paganism and then takes it away, because while death is all that is left the poem still works. It ends, and we are left with uncertainty about faith and religion, but the poem will always exist and I think that is the biggest take away from “Sunday Morning”. The art

of the poem and what this art provides for the people that call upon it is what allows the poetry to exist even after the poet is dead and gone.

Work Cited Stevens, Necessary Angel, pp 170-1. Stevens, Wallace, and Cheryl Jacobsen. Sunday Morning. Winona, MN: Sutton Hoo, 2004. Print....