"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens is a piece of work that represents a struggle with the loss of belief in the Christian God. The woman in this piece concludes that nature, instead of religion, is divine and religious. Wallace Stevens expresses this through his statements about the woman's actions and thoughts. The poem begins with a woman luxuriating in "complacencies of the peignoir, and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair," while "the green freedom of a cockatoo" mingles with the coffee and oranges "to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice" (1247). The failure-or refusal-of the woman to attend church on a Sunday morning, but to instead stay home and enjoy the ordinary, yet somehow transcendent pleasures of an ordinary, yet somehow transcendent morning signals the break with the God of Palestine; the dreaming return "to silent Palestine" manifests the internal struggle over such a break. The second section portrays the argument with a second, probably masculine voice that asks, "Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and dreams?" (1247 ). Here she concludes the question that is not appreciating nature better than a formalized religion? Wallace proves that the woman finds nature divine and religious by listing the things in nature that the woman likes: "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." (1247)The woman also concludes in part five "death is the mother of beauty" (1248). This means that death clears away the withering remnants of the old and, through desire, provides the replacement in the new in a continuous cycle that is ultimately the cause of all beauty and all ugliness, all pleasure and all pain,...
