Pungent Oranges

At the heart of "Sunday Morning" lies an exploration of paradise. Even in a moment of contentment, the speaker "still feels the need of some imperishable bliss." She suspects she can get closer to the divine, to the perfect moment. As a culture, we suspect we can get there only after death. But as imagined in this poem, that Paradise becomes a place of stasis, where "ripe fruit never falls." As the poem drifts, its subject dreams of walking on water to Palestine in the first stanza, unwilling to "give her bounty to the dead" in the second. Divinity's definition, even identity, differs from that of the traditional view of Christ and the sacrifice which bliss requires. The speaker is unwilling to make that sacrifice. Her bounty comprises her emotional experiences which become the measure of her soul. Bliss only exists beyond her reach. So much of that is expressed through her observations of birds who "test the reality of misty fields, by their sweet questionings. . ." and "the consummation of the swallow's wing." Birds even provide the closing image

And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, the casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wallace Steven's language, with the exception of his lack of variety in color naming, can be decorous. "Complacencies of the peignoir" is such a mouthful that a reader might turn away from the poem "Sunday Morning." Instead it intrigues, tantalizes me into reading more. What begins as a lazy brunch retreat develops into a winding meditation that moves between the attractions of life and the possibilities of death, held together by the miracle of sound, represented in the first stanza by the exploding percussive "c" and "p" popping up around such smooth lines as "Winding across the wide water, without sound./The day is like wide water, without sound."

Stevens struggles against the constraints created by exploring this woman's world in the third person. The sections on Jove, Death as the mother of beauty, and the ring of men push into very different territory where there is talk of hinds, lutes, and much blood. He feels the pull of older mythologies and masculine rituals, embodied by Jove, a god with no mother and therefore no attachment to earth or humankind. The friction between the first speaker's world and that of the masculine speaker in other places can only be held in one poem by this division of the meditation into eight parts.

Not only does Stevens explore tensions between concepts of Paradise, the sounds of language, and points of view, he also teases at tensions between abstract language and specific image. In the process he creates a unique music, striking a balance between the complacencies and the green cockatoo. The irony here is that the oranges, coffee and cockatoo cannot drive the reflections of the sacrifice from the sunny room, but are forced into its service.

Deeply embedded structures flow as thought does, with all its diversions, digressions, and repetions. This eventual progression towards completion feels organic. The texture is so complex that it feels as though a reader could never completely comprehend it. Stevens assembled a world with an elegant air, burdened by mortality and lifted up by speculations on paradise, a world in which contentment is not enough and the paradise after death is a bore.