It was at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1979, while doing a course in modern poetry, that I first heard of Philip Larkin, featured among the poets we studied..
Many critics consider him Britain’s best poet since WWII. Later, I would make him a staple of my own university courses in modern poetry. One Larkin poem that impressed me tremendously was “Church Going,” with its somber reflection on Christianity’s demise and, by extension, religion in contemporary life. Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull, was slated to visit our tutorial, only to cancel for whatever reason at the last minute. He died a few years later.
While “Church Going” remains my favorite Larkin poem, it had its thematic precedent, however, in modernist American poet Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning,” published in 1915 and revised in 1923. Like Larkin, Stevens takes up the embers of a once vibrant faith.
It’s not an easy read, Stevens perhaps with Eliot the most erudite of modernists poets. I’ve been thinking a lot of Stevens and this particular poem as Easter approaches. The resurrection is the poem’s temporal center:
I.
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.
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,
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.
Commentary:
The poem commences on a Sunday morning, moving intermittently from the palpable, sensory present—an anonymous woman in nightgown, lounging on a couch, enjoying her coffee and oranges, a green parrot resting on her rug.
An interlocutor voice intrudes with philosophic reflection, setting up dialectic tension: nature’s plenitude versus a “silent Palestine/Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” vague and distant.
II.
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?
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.
Commentary:
The idea of paradise distant and abstract, vividly contrasts with the pungency of the physical world, sufficient in both “grievings” and “elations.”
III.
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,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
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.
Commentary:
The ancient myth of Jove and his non-human birth yields a deity absent of human experience, a monarch remote from sensory, earthly life. Humans project on the universe their need for the palpable (i.e., “blood) to meet what fulfills their longing ( “requital to desire”) to comprehend life’s meaning. Earth, however, is our sole, sufficient paradise: “A part of labor and a part of pain.” Nature, woven into our experiential world, yields a friendlier, knowable cosmos, the stuff of human experience.
IV.
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?”
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, 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.
Commentary:
Here, Stevens address the poem’s pervasive anxiety, the longing for immortality. The woman worries that the beauty of the earth—the “green of April” or the “plum on the golden plate”—is too ephemeral to satisfy the human soul’s longing for something eternal. In rebuttal, the voice argues the insufficiency of vague, mythic afterlife narratives, the “chimera of the grave,/Neither the golden underground, nor isle/Melodious, where spirits gat them home,” to cyclic nature’s sustaining cornucopia of delight.
V.
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. 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,
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.
Commentary:
The woman longs for assurance of a heaven with its bliss in the conflict between rejecting religion and persistent emotional need. Mortality, the voice argues, heightens our awareness of present beauty resplendent in human event.
VI.
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?
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.
Commentary:
The interlocutor’s musing as to the nature of heaven. Is it a place of unchanging sameness, absent of ending ,where “fruit never falls” and the “boughs hang always in that perfect sky”? Is it a place, like earth, of continuing longing,
“With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find…?” Mortality intensifies an awareness of life’s intrinsic value.
VII.
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.
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.
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.
Commentary:
The poem’s climax opens with an extended auditory image of a naturalistic celebration of life—“a chant of paradise”!—cognitive of mortality, enhancing acceptance of its ending:
“They shall know well “the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.”
VIII.
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.”
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.
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.
Commentary:
The concluding stanza commences with the speaker’s rejection of the Resurrection:
“The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
Independent of a transcendent deity, we are granted autonomy (“freedom”), our lives governed by ancient, impersonal physical laws (the “dependency of day and night”) rather than a moral or spiritual prerequisite.
The stanza concludes with the image of an evening flock of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.”
“Ambiguous undulations” suggests impermanence, the inevitable intrusion of change as life transitions from beauty to death. We, like these birds, glide gracefully (“extended wings”), “sinking” inevitably toward the “darkness” of extinction.
REFLECTIONS:
Previous to my retirement, I had taught this poem for some twenty years as part of my course in Modern Poetry, unceasingly admiring its resonant Keats and Wordsworth innuendos.
Paradoxically modern in its delivery, cerebral and image focused, the poem is rooted in English Romanticism, celebrating the imagination’s witness to our fated passage into a parenthesis of light suspended between spheres of darkness.
Like much of Romantic poetry, again that of Wordsworth in its blank verse of unrhymed pentameter, melancholic disposition, rich symbolism, and lofty diction, its voluptuous fantasy, reminiscent of Keats, it supremely celebrates nature.
While there is an insistent tension through much of the poem between nature’s plenitude and the woman’s expressed need for something more, it’s crucial to Stevens’ purpose of philosophical debate.
The final stanza proffers epiphany, the woman’s possible acceptance of a cosmos devoid of divine certitude—“the old chaos of the sun,” a realm of “ambiguous undulations,” where no promise of resurrection intrudes upon the flux of being. We cannot be sure the woman is even present here. Critic Frank Kermode points out Stevens preference for open endings. He sees the poem’s final stanza as process, not conclusion.
Distinguished critic Helen Vender reads the poem as a movement toward a “natural supernaturalism”—a vision in which transcendence is reabsorbed into nature. The final stanza’s birds and “ambiguous undulations” affirm process, not permanence.
Stevens’ masterpiece, a secular hymn, grants solace not in transcendence but in the acceptance—and even the aesthetic affirmation—of metaphysical ambiguity: the freedom to choose, to become arbiters of all that we define as beautiful, grounded wholly within a mortal world.
–RJ
Brimmings: up from the well 