Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt. 4

October 8, 2006

"I am content" is a phrase that demands a period, a full stop. It is hard to say, and made harder as it runs counter to American values. I mean the values of television ads and billboards.. and the general tenor of the American Dream, which is all about getting a little more and living a little better. We have an economy that enshrines those values.. to the extent that spending money can be equated with patriotism. And if we shed the desire to acquire, then what about the desire to succeed? To make something of oneself? We are trained from the cradle to want to be a superstar, to want to be the Michael Jordan of some career or other. When can we say "I am content"?

She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

fourth stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

One could say that this is the most Pauline of Wallace Stevens' poetry, in the sense that what propels it forward are a series of imagined questions, which are answered by the narrator.. much as Paul propels his letter of Romans by means of imagined objections.

The first question asked by the woman sitting outside on a Sunday morning picks up on the rhetorical question in the previous stanza: "And shall the earth/ Seem all of paradise that we shall know?" The idea that this earth could be a paradise makes some sense to the woman, who notes that on a cool morning, as the birds warble their "sweet questionings", she can say "I am content". That is fine in the spring, but what about when winter comes, and the fields are bear and the birds gone? "Where, then, is paradise?"

The narrator meets this objection squarely, listing a series of places vaguely reminiscent of different religious conceptions of the afterlife. Golden underground, isle melodious, visionary south, and any other imagined version of the paradise to come after death are dismissed. None of these places has endured "As April's green endures." The point is simple: sure, spring passes every year, but just as certainly the spring returns the next year. As an annual fact of human existence, spring can be counted as eternal.. at least as eternal as the changing fictions concocted by humans concerning the afterlife.

April is eternal in a second way: it endures in memory. Here Stevens comes as close to William Wordsworth as he ever gets. There are spots of time that cling to the memory and provide comfort in life. The cool green of April departs, but its peace and beauty remain in the mind.. that earthly paradise is never really gone.. certainly not in the winter. The "desire for June" is eternal in the same way.

The valorization of human waking life—at the expense of imagined visions of the next life—leads to the experience of earth as a paradise. If this present—right now—thinking and knowing is all there is, then one does not pass over a Sunday morning thinking about another world, but awake and feeling.. simply enjoying the sound of wakened birds, testing the reality of the misty fields.