“Sunday Morning” Summary

“Sunday Morning” Themes

• 

  Religion and Meaning in Modern Life

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• 

  Humanity and Nature

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• 

  Beauty, Death, and Change

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sunday Morning”

• Lines 1-5

  Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
  Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
  And the green freedom of a cockatoo
  Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
  The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 6-10

  She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
  Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
  As a calm darkens among water-lights.
  The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
  Seem things in some procession of the dead,

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 11-15

  Winding across wide water, without sound.
  The day is like wide water, without sound,
  Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
  Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
  Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 16-22

  Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
  What is divinity if it can come
  Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
  Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
  In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
  In any balm or beauty of the earth,
  Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 23-30

  Divinity must live within herself:
  Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
  Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
  Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
  Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
  All pleasures and all pains, remembering
  The bough of summer and the winter branch.
  These are the measures destined for her soul.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 31-35

  Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
  No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
  Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
  He moved among us, as a muttering king,
  Magnificent, would move among his hinds,

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 36-38

  Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
  With heaven, brought such requital to desire
  The very hinds discerned it, in a star.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 39-45

  Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
  The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
  Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
  The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
  A part of labor and a part of pain,
  And next in glory to enduring love,
  Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 46-50

  She says, “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?”

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 51-56

  There is not any haunt of prophecy,
  Nor any old chimera of the grave,
  Neither the golden underground, nor isle
  Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
  Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
  Remote on heaven’s hill,

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 56-60

  that has endured
  As April’s green endures; or will endure
  Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
  Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
  By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 61-65

  She says, “But in contentment I still feel
  The need of some imperishable bliss.”
  Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
  Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
  And our desires.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 65-69

  Although she strews the leaves
  Of sure obliteration on our paths,
  The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
  Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
  Whispered a little out of tenderness,

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 70-75

  She makes the willow shiver in the sun
  For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
  Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
  She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
  On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
  And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 76-82

  Is there no change of death in paradise?
  Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
  Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
  Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
  With rivers like our own that seek for seas
  They never find, the same receding shores
  That never touch with inarticulate pang?

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 83-90

  Why set the pear upon those river-banks
  Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
  Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
  The silken weavings of our afternoons,
  And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
  Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
  Within whose burning bosom we devise
  Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 91-95

  Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
  Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
  Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
  Not as a god, but as a god might be,
  Naked among them, like a savage source.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 96-101

  Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
  Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
  And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
  The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
  The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
  That choir among themselves long afterward.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 102-105

  They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
  Of men that perish and of summer morn.
  And whence they came and whither they shall go
  The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 106-109

  She hears, upon that water without sound,
  A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
  Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
  It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 110-113

  We live in an old chaos of the sun,
  Or old dependency of day and night,
  Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
  Of that wide water, inescapable.

  

  

  

  

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• Lines 114-120

  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.

  

  

  

  

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“Sunday Morning” Symbols

• 

  The Sky

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• 

  The Story of the Maidens

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• 

  Fruit

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“Sunday Morning” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Alliteration

  

  

  

  

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• Assonance

  

  

  

  

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• Repetition

  

  

  

  

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• Rhetorical Question

  

  

  

  

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• Imagery

  

  

  

  

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• Allusion

  

  

  

  

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“Sunday Morning” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Complacencies
• Peignoir
• Cockatoo
• Dissipate
• Encroachment
• Catastrophe
• Palestine
• Dominion
• Sepulchre
• Balm
• Unsubdued
• Elations
• Jove
• Large-mannered motions
• Mythy
• Hinds
• Commingling
• Requital
• Haunt of prophecy
• Chimera of the grave
• Golden underground
• Gat
• Consummation
• Imperishable
• Brassy
• Wont
• Relinquished
• Inarticulate
• Insipid
• Lutes
• Orgy
• Morn
• Boisterous
• Their lord
• Serafin
• Manifest
• Dependency
• Unsponsored
• Undulations

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sunday Morning”

• Form

• Meter

• Rhyme Scheme

“Sunday Morning” Speaker

“Sunday Morning” Setting

Literary and Historical Context of “Sunday Morning”

More “Sunday Morning” Resources

• External Resources

  • On Jove — Learn more about the Roman god of the sky and thunder.

  • Wallace Stevens's Biography — Learn more about the poet's life and work in this biography from the Poetry Foundation.

  • A Critic on "Sunday Morning" — Watch a video of poetry critic Helen Vendler speaking about "Sunday Morning."

  • The Poem Out Loud — Listen to a reading of "Sunday Morning."

• LitCharts on Other Poems by Wallace Stevens

  • Anecdote of the Jar

  • Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

  • The Emperor of Ice-Cream

  • The Idea of Order at Key West

  • The Snow Man

  • Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird