Sunday Morning

I really enjoyed this poem, both for the style of the language and for the religious meditations. I'm not entirely sure ,but the poem seems to be suggesting that the modern organization of religion is a farce and does not capture the true nature of spirituality. The poem suggests instead that a more pagan spirituality is more likely to capture the temporal beauty of existence. Wallace describes a scene of a ring of "supple and turbulent" men who sing aloud upon a hilltop to "mourn" the summer and to describe their devotion to the natural forces ("sun," "blood," "sky," "the windy lake," "the trees," "echoing hills"). Their god is not jove in the clouds with his "inhuman birth," but rather as though "a god might be,/ naked among them." Wallace seems to suggest here that the natural signs of divinity that, though fleeting, and as he comes to recognize, sinking "downward to darkness, on extended wings," are more fulfilling of mankind's view of paradise than the immortal things "remote on heaven's hill." Wallace posits through the voice of the maiden that "death is the mother of beauty," and thus only because of death can mankind dream and feel desire. Though death does bring about sorrow and "strews leaves of sure obliteration on our paths," the rewards are much greater, as she "makes the willows shiver in the sun," and "causes boys to pile new plums and pears on disregarded plate." Wallace suggests the presence of springtime lust and desire, such lust that seemingly only comes about with the knowledge of coming winter. Thus, the rituals of worship that seek to find a heaven where death is no longer present seem to wallace to be a misundertanding of paradise, and because those rituals take away from appreciation of the "mystical" beauty of the world, he holds that "comforts of the sun" are a better focus of spiritual meditation.