Consider My Meditations:
"Sunday Morning" pt.5

October 22, 2006

Every now and then someone asks you to think back to the happiest moment of your life. My mind for some reason goes back to an odd moment: a home run I hit in little league baseball. I must have been in the 7th grade, as we were living in Redlands, and we were playing on the baseball diamonds behind my junior high school. A friend of mine was pitching, a guy names Raul Diaz. Not a great pitcher. He served me up a good pitch and I connected fully to the baseball. It is hard to explain to someone who has not played baseball what that feels like, but when it happens it is just a peaceful effortless thing. The ball cleared the high right field fence and bounced into the street. I rounded the bases (understand that I was never a home run hitter) and I don't think I fully felt my feet hitting the ground. I made it around the bases and stamped on home plate. I don't think it made any great difference in the game.. I think we were ahead anyways.. but I sat in the dugout and felt numb with happiness. I remember my dad sitting in the metal bleachers to the side of the dugout, and he gave me a proud nod. That is what I always think of as my happiest moment.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

fifth stanza of "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens

Again the stanza begins with a question from the woman sitting outside on a Sunday morning. She has understood the answer of the invisible narrator.. approving of the idea that spring in its annual return has a measure of eternity. But still she is not satisfied, and she begins with the disjunctive "but": "But in contentment I still feel/ The need of some imperishable bliss." That is to say: "I long for the happiness that will stay forever".. as if that feeling of hitting a home run could be permanent.

The longing for permanence is not easily discarded, and Stevens will now devote two stanzas to the question. This first one looks at it from a positive viewpoint, while the next one imagines a counter-factual world.

In both cases the answer lies wrapped up in the simple assertion: "Death is the mother of beauty"—repeated in both stanzas. I guess that is a tough one to accept at its face value. A couple of days ago I walked past the tiny shrivelled corpse of a squirrel. That was death, and it was not beautiful.

For the first few lines Stevens does not defend his assertion, he simply draws the conclusion that must follow from its truth: "hence from her,/ Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our desires." The "her" here and the "she" in the following lines must refer to death. If death gives rise to beauty, then it is to death that we must look for the fulfillment of dreams and desires.

Continuing from this statement and conclusion is a complex sentence that begins with "although". Yes, death scatters "sure obliteration" on every experience. Human experiences must be imagined as multiple paths that one walks in life.. an endless tangle of them.. ranging from sadness to elation to the touch of love. All these human paths are ephemeral by nature, and doomed to obliteration.

Now come back to the main thought: although it is the case that all these human paths are doomed to pass away, "[Death] makes the willow shiver in the sun/ For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze/ Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet." The previous stanza pointed to spring and summer, but now we have settled into fall. The leaves of the willow quake in the sun, and in the last line the maidens will be straying in the "littering leaves". What do those maidens do? They sit in the grass, "relinquished to their feet". The world is theirs, but it is a decaying world.. the young green shoots sacrificed for their brief pleasure. And what about the boys? They promptly pluck the plums and pears. Yet another reminder of the way experience depends upon change.

The strength of this line of reasoning will not be clear until the next stanza, when we are asked to imagine a very different world. But for now we contemplate an idealized scene, resembling somewhat a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema.. with its maidens, boys, fruits on a plate, and strewn leaves. It is a step away from the reality of "coffee and oranges in a sunny chair", but still a portrait of waking life. Through accumulated references to small seasonal changes and heedless thoughtless enjoyment of the world, Stevens underlines the presence of death in human experience.

The woman's question is thus answered in the negative: no, there is no imperishable bliss, and it should not be looked for. What makes a beautiful moment perfect is in fact its very context within a dying world. If beauty is located contextually, then there can be no point in imagining an imperishable beauty. The moment of beauty comes, and it is that fleeting quality of beauty which in fact defines beauty. Death is the mother of beauty. Beauty, can never be eternal.