24 pages • 48 minutes read
Sunday Morning
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Symbols & Motifs
Birds and Wings
“Sunday Morning” is littered with avian imagery. The first bird appears in the form of “a cockatoo / Upon a rug” (Lines 3-4), whose “green freedom” (Line 3) helps to “dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice” (Lines 4-5). Just as quickly as it appears, however, the cockatoo’s wings are transformed from emblems of domestic contentment to “bright, green wings / […] in some procession of the dead” (Lines 9-10). The poem wrests the cockatoo back from transcendence in a following section, which recasts the “bright, green wings” (Line 20) as a “balm or beauty of the earth” (Line 21).
Wings are closely associated with Christian images of transcendence, with heaven and the angelic. However, the poem plays tug-of-war with this connotation, continually surrendering winged imagery to this association before reclaiming it as symbolic of the immediate, immanent, and natural. When the woman begins speaking to the poem directly, her question explicitly concerns birds: “when the birds are gone […] / where, then, is paradise” (Lines 49-50)? The poem responds, saying that no heavenly paradise can endure as long as “her desire for June and evening, tipped / By the consummation of the swallow’s wings” (Line 59-60). In this exchange, birds first stand in for the wonders of the natural world that must eventually die, and then the fulfillment of desire that can only rest in the wonders of nature.
Because of the constant reversal of the symbolic role of birds and winged imagery in the poem, their appearance in the conclusion is complex. The poem’s final lines depart from argumentation or rhetoric and instead simply describe a single image:
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings (Lines 118-120).
This complexity allows Stevens to end his poem not with a definitive conclusion but with an event that contains numerous meanings, emblematic of the world itself. Human beings might grapple with spiritual issues, arguing with each other and themselves, but “At evening” (Line 118), birds will still fly home to roost, making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink” (Line 119). The ambiguity they contain is constitutive of what they are, in the poem as in life.
The Sun
There is a long history in the West of associating the sun with the divine. Much of Christianity theology, extending back to its earliest instantiations, depends on Platonic philosophy, which utilizes the sun as a symbol of beauty, goodness, and true reality. The linguistic similarity in English between sun and Son (of God) has helped cement the long association of Christ with God and the dawning of a new day. It might be surprising to a reader of “Sunday Morning,” then, that Stevens employs the sun as a symbol of immanence instead of transcendence.
In its first appearance in the poem, the “sunny chair” (Line 2) in which the breakfasting woman sits helps her to “dissipate / The holy hush of ancient” (Line 5) Christian thought. The “balm or beauty of the earth” (Line 21)—the bounties of nature and the immediate, sensible realm of immanence—are referred to by the poem as the “comforts of the sun” (Line 19). For the poem, “Death is the mother of beauty” (Line 63) and it “makes the willow shiver in the sun” (Line 70)—in other words, death causes the willow to appreciate its time in the warmth of the immanent sun. The poem notes, “We live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night” (Lines 110-111), using the sun to refer to old modes of thought that divide nature into categories infused with transcendent connotations. However, rather than casting the sun aside, Stevens makes it the center of his imagined future of purely immanent religion, where people chant “Their boisterous devotion to the sun, / Not as a god, but as a god might be, / […] among them” (Lines 93-95).
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By Wallace Stevens
