This poem was published in part in November 1915 issue of “Poetry” journal and later in full in “Harmonium” the first collection of Steven’s poems in 1923. Many of Steven’s poems deal with use of Nature, death, religion, art and philosophy to explore profound themes. This poem consists of eight fifteen-line stanzas written in loose blank verse of a power unmatched by any English poet since Wordsworth except Robert Browning. This poem is full of vivid imagery, Biblical allusions and challenging syntax.
This poem deals with the ultimate question of
the meaning of human existence. The poem begins with the scene of an old woman
sitting comfortably over a late breakfast on a Sunday morning musing over
crucifixion of Jesus Christ. The woman relaxes in her chair enjoying her
morning. She felt like a green parrot. She dreams about Christ’s crucifixion
which belonged to mute past times. She dreams of going back to Palestine
crossing the silent waters of time. The ancient country where Christ dwelt
represented death, tombs and bloodshed. The pleasant domestic feeling of the
old woman dressed in peignoir relaxing in a chair on the carpet with the
painted figure of a green cockatoo suggests the woman flouting the norms of her
era by skipping church and preferring to stay at home enjoying her morning
breakfast. This type of nonconformity to tradition or convention is seen in
poems of Emily Dickinson and Romantic poets who preferred naturalism over
religion. T.E. Hulme defines naturalism as the “spilt religion” which provides
a secular spirituality as a backdrop to this poem. Stevens employs a sonorous
and sensuous diction suggesting the dreamy mood, fantasy and vision of
Romantics like Coleridge, Blake and Keats.
In the
second stanza the woman questions the validity of the vague concept of religion
without any concrete promise and palpable feelings. “Why should she give her
bounty to the dead?”. Her bounty comprises herself—her mind, body and her
heart. Why should she pledge these to dead gods and beliefs, to the kind of
divinity which manifests itself briefly and ambiguously? She tries to find
religion within her own self. The responses and experiences of herself to the
warm sun, ripe fruit, green parrots and other scenes evoke a religious feeling
within her. “Divinity must live within
herself” assimilating all the pleasures and pains if earthly experiences around
her.
The third stanza repeats the mythical existence of Jove who is the master but not understood. He moved among us until our blood interacted with heaven. He descended from his superhuman level to experience like humans by commingling his blood with persons as seen in ancient tales of gods seducing humans. (Jove in the form of a swan seduced Leda, a Spartan queen. He fell in love with Europa, a princess and carried her disguised as a beautiful white bull). This commingling suggests the virginal birth of Jesus. The star represents the star of Bethlehem. The poet questions whether this will lead to humans deposing and discarding their gods and forming a friendly and harmonious relationship with Nature. By means of this relationship we can turn earth into a paradise. Then the sky seems no more a dividing barrier but a friendly gateway sharing our pleasure and pain, the inseparable parts of human existence. “The sky will be much friendlier now/Not this dividing and indifferent blue.” The death of numerous myths justify that they have lost their relevance and value.
The fourth
stanza presents a catalogue of intangible objects of tradition and fictions of
immortality that have lost their relevance to earthly reality. M.H. Abrahams
said that this passage resembled Wordsworth’s thoughts in “Recluse” who tried
to salvage paradise doomed to be a fiction by locating it in “the common day.” The
chimera, the prophets, the underworld, the melodious isle and the visionary
south cannot be experienced as April’s green as image of world’s continuity. The
flying swallows represent change and movement. The woman finds consummation of
her feelings in watching earthly sights. The bird’s sweet questionings
challenging the misty fields confirm the woman’s doubts about the death of
Jesus and the birth of Jove in the cloudy sky. Her vivid apprehension of the
world even in retrospect or prospect is more powerful than imaginary creation.
In the fourth stanza the poet affirms that the
woman’s personal memories and desires will retain their potency longer than any
vision of paradise. “Like her remembrance of awakened birds/Or her desire for
June and evening, tipped/By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.”
The fifth stanza depicts the earthly
sensuality just like Keats did in “The Eve of St. Agnes Eve”. The woman feels
imperishable bliss in the world of temporary pleasures. She finds answer in
death who offers us fulfilment. She is called “the mother of beauty” who
motivates people to enjoy the present and their senses are sharpened with the
knowledge of inevitable death. Our lives are wanderings in a wood and our
achievements and our mistakes will be buried with our bodies. The words
“strews, stray and littering” suggest the possibility of many oaths and
randomness of life with a sense of mystery. The trembling willow leaves
represent changing nature of worldly reality. The plums and pears just gathered
from grass and picked from the trees show how every moment comes to fruition
and pass into oblivion. The image of
maidens sitting and gazing on the grass and the boys piling plums and pears on
the plate suggest the earthly experiences which pass into oblivion soon. Yet
they derive satisfaction in these transient things though they know that they
are not permanent. The famous line “Death is the mother of beauty” recalls Keats’
lines “Now much more than ever seems it rich to die” in “Ode to a Nightingale”
and “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” in Keats’ “Endymion”. Like terminally
ill Keats Stevens recognized that the foreknowledge of mortality and loss
fosters our most intense sensations- the mingled pleasure and pain- we experience
as beauty.
The sixth
stanza shows the static beauty of the paradise without change. The sterile
unchanging heaven evokes the frozen scene in Keats’ famous poem “Ode on a
Grecian urn.” There the ripe fruit never falls and there is no need for lutes
since there is no place for melancholy in paradise. The poet has no fascination
for such a place where rivers do not flow to join the sea. The woman’s needs
can be answered only by the world’s temporal beauty and for her paradise is
another version of our caring mother. The burning bosom refers to the beauty
creating finality of death beyond any logic. “Death is the mother of beauty,
mystical/Within whose burning bosom we devise/Our earthly mothers waiting
sleeplessly.”
In the
seventh stanza the woman experiences earthly paradise. The pagan form of
worship participating in the joy of creation suggests the need for harmonious
relationship with nature. The vanishing dew suggests the brief existence of our
relationships. The collective chanting of men indicates their desire to be
close to their god. To them sun is not a god. It is a sign of divinity.
Paradise is their desire to be greeted in death by their earthly mothers. The
sun as a symbol of divinity refers to the narrator’s attempt to go back to
primordial condition.
In the last
poem the woman comes out of her daydream and returns to the world of reality.
The woman hears a voice that cries that the death of Jesus was like any other
death and that his tomb is merely a grave, and not the threshold of another world.
Dream gives way to reality. This earth is created out of the chaos and depends
only on the sun’s appearance and disappearance. Our world is a solitary place
without any superhuman or supernatural presence. Imagination alone imposes
order on it. To feel free in this world we should have primitive faith in
Nature and trust Her who protects us like her own children. The images of deer
walking upon the mountains, the whistling quails, the sweet berries in
wilderness indicate the friendliness of our environment and freedom of earthly
reality. The ambiguous movements of flying pigeons suggest the unknowable and
incomplete search for divinity. The woman‘s desire to go back to Palestine
indicates that paradise, inner divinity and imperishable bliss depend upon the
restoration of some primordial state.
These lines reveal
the narrator’s sceptic view of resurrection and religious concept of heaven.
The narrator prefers inner divinity and a friendlier sky without mythical gods.
Though the real world seems chaotic with a sense of isolation, one feels free
with so many sources of delight. The vision of dancing men celebrating their
devotion to the sun represents humanity stripped of pretensions and
illusions. The lines “whence they came
and whither they shall go/The dew upon their feet shall manifest” suggest a
kind of redemption by way of reabsorption into Nature. “Their chant shall be a chant of paradise/Out
of their blood, returning to the sky.“
This poem
shows the poet as a hedonist who believes in earthly religion. The sensuous
images and graceful rhythm show his preference for worldly pleasures and pains
rather than mysterious dreamy concept of paradise. Steven’s poems are questionings
and enquiries. More than disbelief it is this irresolution that marks the poem
as modern. The celebration of freedom and spontaneity are quintessentially
American. This poem is partly metaphysical and partly romantic and explores the
idea of the origin and end of the human belief. The belief in supernatural gods
is breaking down. So humans have to re-invent fresh modes of belief based on
reality. The Christian belief in fear and guilt, sacrifice and future rewards
need to be balanced by sensual experience in the real, tangible world. Stevens
felt that it was the job of poetry to fill this void left by the melt down of
religious faith. Using the influence of French symbolists and French painters
and the use of imagination the poet tried to shape a new reality to help
replace the old supernatural beliefs.
This poem
looks at the history of religious gods and the human relationship with
them. Mythical gods are beyond the human
sphere and now gods are to be found within each individual human being.
“Divinity must live within herself.” Steven explores the contrast between our
beautiful perishing reality and static fantasy land we struggle to imagine.
Keats in his “Ode on Grecian Urn” likewise contrasts the static cold pastoral
and pagan celebration with dynamic flux of life. This poem bears out Stevens’
claim” the poem is simply an expression of paganism.” The literary critic Yvor
Winters considered “Sunday Morning” as “the greatest poem of the twentieth
century….. and one of the greatest contemplative poems in English.” Helen Vendler summarized the poem as
Stevens’s search for “a systematic truth that could replace the Christianity of
his churchgoing boyhood.” Robert Buttel opines that both Stevens and Henri
Matisse, the French painter tried “to transform a pagan joy of life into highly
civilized terms.”
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28th January, 2021 Somaseshu Gutala
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