sunday morning

At first I was unsure of this poem, but aftre reading it stanza by stanza while relishing each line, I realized I like the poem a lot. I also like the title of the poem because at first I did not think of "Sunday Morning" but rather "Sunday Mourning" because the poem does talk a lot about detah and spirituality which is part of both sunday mornings and mourning. Perhaps Stevens was aware of this in writing the titel. I think the poem is best summed up through the final stanza as the woman comes to the end of her spiritual qualm. She resolves that believing in the beauty of nature and the living is what matters. Throughout the poem Stevens works his way up to the sky and heavens, but this final stanza takes a dip back down with the “causal flocks of pigeons” that make “ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” The woman realizes she does not desire “paradise, the “sun,” nor “heaven,” which the men in the previous stanza glorify. Instead her thoughts are swept “downward” back into the “darkness which was presented in the first stanza. She does not want to devote herself to the dead which is what religion envies. For example, in Christianity, Christians glorify Jesus, who obviously died, and Christians also glorify death. The woman resolves to find her spiritual tranquility in the non dead of the living on earth.