Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 3

September 24, 2006

During my years at Prairie in Alberta, I remember looking up at the iron-blue sky, unobstructed by mountains on any horizon. It was different than the penned-up sky of mountainous Southern California. The sky there looked like the biblical firmament.. ready to crack and pour down deep blue. I am sure that an extended flat prairie.. and freezing air.. helps to heighten that brittle appearance.. but still, it seemed like there was something unusually cold and distant about the sky. It never looks like that to me now.

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

[third stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

In the course of "Sunday Morning" there are two stanzas we could label as "pagan". This is the first. The introduction of Jove (the opening word!) pulls us out of what had previously been an internal dispute between the waking life and the dark shadow of "silent Palestine."

Jove is not introduced as an alternative God.. the name offers Stevens the chance to unspool a philosophical myth.. a mode Plato would have recognized. The myth is about the presence of an abstracted god among his creation. It is an abstracted god since he has no mother and no land.. that is to say, he has no context in reality. Jove walks among his creation with his "mythy-mind". That phrase I take to be the key point here: Jove represents the the rational and constructing intellect.. the source for all human myths. The god of myth is a stand-in for myth-making itself.

The image of intellect taking its place among human beings is that of a magnificent muttering king among his hinds (i.e. lowly peasants). The two have nothing to do with each other: the king mutters of something unknown, the hinds go on with their lives. That disconnection rules "until" these two elements become mixed up.. commingled.

The key line for this stanza is "...The very hinds discerned it, in a star." The "it" must go back to the "requital to desire" of the previous line. Lowly ones, mixed with the myth of intellect, discover a physical answer to the desires stirred by the myth-making intellect.. and they see that requital imaged in a star. Suddenly we are back in Christian territory, as the star must be the star leading to Bethlehem. That incarnation representing a stupendous mixing of myth and reality.. the possibility of human idealism.

The next two lines offer two alternatives. The first question is "shall our blood fail?" Which must mean a failure of the mixture.. we could either become abstracted or lose the capacity for abstraction. But if the mingling works, our blood shall become "the blood of paradise".. and along with that the earth shall "Seem all of paradise that we shall know". Any notion of paradise would be impossible without a sense of myth and possibility. Likewise if paradise remained a myth it could never be lived and felt.

Were this commingling successful, the sky would look different to us, "much friendlier than now." Our vast blue canopy would not stand as an image of transcendent and unreachable values.. of another world up there. It would be a partner with us. A partner in our labor and pain even. We would feel at home in our world.. an odd thought, I know.