Sunday Morning

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Immanence and Transcendence

While Stevens doesn’t use either the term “immanence” or “transcendence” in “Sunday Morning,” the tension between the two helps define the text. Immanence is the state of being within a thing, in this case, the world. The list that begins the poem is a list characterized by immanence: a “peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (Lines 1-2) all exist within the world that is at the fingertips of the woman in the text. Transcendence, on the other hand, is a state of exceeding the limits of a thing, in this case, the world or human understanding. The transcendent is exemplified by the divine (at least, in traditional Western thought). The “holy hush of ancient sacrifice” (Line 5) that intrudes on the breakfasting woman’s morning is an example of the otherworldly mysteries of religious transcendence. When “Jove” appears in the poem, it is as an example of transcendence. The god “in the clouds” (Line 31) is not from this world: He “had his inhuman birth” (Line 31), lacked an earthly “mother [to] suckle[] him” (Line 32), and had “no sweet land” (Line 32) in which to grow but the otherworldly heavens.

The sequence of these concepts’ appearance is crucial to their rhetorical place in the text. A woman enjoying a seemingly delightful morning of pure immanence—the “complacencies” (Line 1) of loungewear, the warmth of coffee, sweetness of oranges, and “the green freedom” (Line 3) of the cockatoo all combine to “dissipate” (Line 4) the traditional sanctity of Sunday mornings in the West, long dominated by Christian religious services. Here, the body and the senses create an immanent pleasure that defeats the draw of transcendent thinking, at least temporarily. Before long, the woman “dreams a little” (Line 6), her imagination working against her senses to usher in “the dark / Encroachment” (Lines 6-7) of the transcendent “Dominion of the blood and sepulchre” (Line 15).

While the remainder of the poem enlists history, imagism, and rhetoric to examine and argue the relationship between the immanent and transcendent, the conflict is contained in miniature in the poem’s first section. The conflict between the two modes of thinking plays itself out in the woman’s inner life, with her senses championing immanence and her “dreams” (Line 6) continually resurrecting the shadow of transcendence. The divinity of transcendence, according to the poem, is “[o]nly in silent shadows and in dreams” (Line 18), and it is directly contrasted with the “comforts of the sun” (Line 19). For the text, to pledge oneself to a transcendent otherworld is to “give [one’s] bounty to the dead” (Line 16).

Instead, the poem imagines a future where the bounties of immanence are not continually interrupted by dreams of transcendence. Stevens depicts a manifestation of the religious impulse that grounds itself not in a heavenly transcendence but a material, immediate immanence: a “chant in orgy on a summer morn / […] to the sun” (Lines 92-93). Here, what is worshipped is neither a “golden underground” (Line 53) nor a spiritual “visionary” “isle / Melodious” (Lines 55, 53-54) but instead a “savage source” (Line 95). Paradise is not a faraway, mystical place toward which one is always journeying, in Stevens’s reimagined, paganist religion. Instead, it is a “source” (Line 95) endemic to the world out of which all sensory experiences of the immanent proceed.

Mortality and Meaning

The most indisputably famous—and quoted—phrase in the poem appears in its fifth section: “Death is the mother of beauty” (Line 63). The pithy phrase sums up one of the poem's most central themes, which factors into the rhetorical structure of the poem as a primary argument against a transcendent, religious paradise. The woman in the poem identifies the “imperishable bliss” (Line 62), or the eternal aspect of religious paradise, as a major hang-up to fully ridding herself of transcendent thinking. After all, while she is “content” (Line 46) to watch “wakened birds / […] fly” (Lines 46-47), she is haunted by what happens “when the birds are gone” (Line 49) and the fields in which they fly “[r]eturn no more” (Line 50). In other words, can nature really be paradise if everything in it is fated to eventually die? The poem’s speaker first responds to this question by claiming that no spiritual paradise will or can endure “as April’s green endures” (Line 57), or even someone’s “remembrance of awakened birds, / Or her desire for June and evening” (Lines 58-59). While religious paradises might come and go, nature and desire persist, in whatever form.

This answer, however, is not satisfactory to the woman in the poem, who “still feel[s] / The need” (Lines 61-62) for the everlasting. It is at this stage that the poem devotes two sections to the argument that beauty and meaning are dependent on mortality: “Death is the mother of beauty” (Line 63) and the sole ground for the “fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires” (Lines 64-65). The poem declares that, without mortality, there can be “no change” (Line 76). In a deathless paradise, “ripe fruit never fall[s]” (Line 77) and “rivers like our own […] seek for seas / They never find” (Lines 80-81). In this way, the pleasures of paradise are only imitations of the immanent bounties of nature. As the speaker puts it, in heaven “they […] wear our colors” (Line 85). There is no meaning to “set[ting] the pear upon [deathless] river-banks” (Line 83), or to do anything, because there are no stakes. For Stevens, any meaningful engagement with the bounties of the senses is predicated on its evanescence.