Explication of "Sunday Morning"
Explication of "Sunday Morning" Robert Pasell In Wallace Steven's poem, "Sunday Morning" the idea of religion as it relates to reality is explored through the mind of a woman. It is not through the woman's 'religious voice', but the voice of agnosticism, in her mind, that the poem is narrated. The poem is a debate within her head, between her agnostic voice and her religious voice on the perception of divinity. Her agnostic voice questions religion, in which a problem of faith in the world is shown. It's shown through the woman's agnostic thoughts that those who believe in a creed that is not from an immediate perception of the visible world are living in illusion, and this illusion can make them unhappy. Through this agnostic ideal, religion is a form of illusion based on what is not visible and real. Death is shown as an absolute of human existence, and that the knowledge that death ends all, stimulates the awareness of beauty. In the woman's thoughts, it is shown that peopl!e should accept this condition and shed the illusion of religion and in this acceptance free themselves to love the world around them, and find paradise in this world. By giving the agnostic side the duty of narration and the religious side a duty of quest
The agnostic voice asks, is earth to be the only "paradise" we know. The agnostic responds through an example of the religious doctrines, beginning to take an active voice within its narration. People live on earth and are of the earth; about us earth offers its majesty and beauty and power. Instead she is sitting in her dressing room, dressed in a robe, with oranges and coffee on the table. In paradise, everything is like earth, but static, and unchanging. "Why should she give her bounty to the dead? / What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and dreams? / Shall she not find in comforts of the sun," (Abcarian, pg 324). In the agnostic voice, she furthers this line of thought by questioning why divinity cannot be represented in an earthly form, why a persons existence can't be found in physical earthly bonds. This helps to put aside the duty she feels under the Christian doctrine to go to church and celebrate Christ's death and man's salvation. In this "imperishable bliss", the religious voice denies death, which is what creates beauty within human's view of the world. Although she strews the leaves / Of sure obliteration on our paths" (Abcarian, pg 326) The agnostic voice persists, that it is the imminence of death, which thrills us with the beauty of existence. Through the agnostic voice, the question is posed as to whether or not the earthly bonds will be enough to satiate her mind, "And shall the earth / Seem all the paradise that we shall know" (Abcarian, pg 325). This shows the classic ideas as unreal and only a figment of reality and cannot compare to the agnostic's offering which is a concrete example of the incredible beauty the earth has to offer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------**Bibliography**WORKS CITED Stevens, Wallace. It is through a romantic ideal of agnosticism that death is shown as the mother of beauty and that beauty and bliss can only be represented on earth because of our human condition of death. It's aging that turns her thoughts to death and motivates her thoughts of divinity.
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Acceptance Essays
