Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 2

September 17, 2006

Taking our dog out for a walk at certain times of the day has proved to be an interesting discipline. First of all, it keeps me conscious of the weather every day. That may seem odd, but after working on my dissertation for a couple of years, I know that a day can pass and I know nothing about what it is like outside. Taking the dog out also lets me get a sense of the immediate neighborhod.. a sense that is a little more intimate than the one I develop while driving from place to place. I find favorite houses and streets. I guess I would say that walking the dog is a discipline that leads to greater awareness.. it leads me to feel more awake to the actual world. And it is in that spirit that I want to approach the next paragraph of Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning."

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

second stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

This stanza starts to define the waking life and its inherent divinity. It begins by breaking away from the trend of the last stanza, which had started with coffee and oranges and the "green freedom of a cockatoo", but then wandered into the darkened thoughts related to the "old catastrophe." With the opening questions of this stanza our narrator pushes back: "Why should she give her bounty to the dead?" Or, why should the world of shadows and dreams overpower the present waking life, which includes so much simple and clear good?

What of those simple and colorful details that started the poem? They are things "to be cherished like the thought of heaven." It seems to me that lying behind this is the idea that what takes our attention away from the here and now is the sense that something better lies ahead.. in the next world.. and that easily becomes the focus of the imagination to the exclusion of the common waking world. But these common things can mean so much more than we suspect: they can be "like the thought of heaven".. if we simply turn our attention toward them.

The line "Divinity must live within herself:" points ahead, as is made clear by the colon. What follows is a laundry list of emotions and moods.. "gusty/ Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights". Emotions and the weather.. two of the most notable elements of waking life. This stretches our conception of waking life. It is not composed solely of calm Sunday mornings, with the complacencies of the peignoir, but includes all the possible feelings that accompany life.. the elations and sadnesses.. "all pleasures and pains". All this waking life is not to be passed over for future consolation, but to be experienced for itself.. as an end in itself.

"These are the measures destined for her soul." A counter-argument will be introduced soon.. but for now we see that waking life is the standard by which a soul is to be judged.. has this person been alive to the gusts of wind and elations of feeling? Or has the soul been carried away to a great procrastination, letting the thought of heaven.. or some other shadowy and dreamy thing.. to be the balm of this life.