Poem "Sunday Morning"

In his poem "Sunday Morning," Wallace Stevens writes a work that flows and has musical qualities especially striking in blank verse, though his imagery is once more dense and requires close reading to understand. The poem is a religious work, and its reference to "Sunday Morning" is to that time when people are supposed to begin contemplating the life of Christ and its meaning to them. In the woman who is pictured in the opening passages we find someone in whom is embodied the tension between body and spirit, between the pleasures of this world and the contemplations of the next.

The image is of a woman who has just arisen on a Sunday morning and who is settling down in comfort to enjoy the pleasures of this world, and Stevens evokes these pleasures in striking images centering on the opening words "Complacencies of the peignoir" (1), the woman having just arisen and now settling down in he peignoir without examining her actions or the need for spiritual enlightenment instead of "Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair" (2). These things plus the "green freedom of a cockatoo/ Upon a rug mingle to dissipate/ The holy hush of ancient sacrifice" (3-5). The ancient sacr

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