This essay offers an explication of Wallace Stevens' poem "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman."
             Addressing "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," the speaker proposes "poetry" as "the supreme fiction" (line 1) rather than God or religion. Stevens considered religion as fictions, imaginative creations that made it possible for people to feel at home in a world that is not naturally homelike and hospitable. Thus the speaker's statement suggests that religious fictions have no greater status than fictions of the imagination that include sensuality and play. Yet in his announcement that poetry is "the supreme fiction," the speaker proclaims the supremacy of the human creative imagination.
             Religion ("the moral law" [line 2]) has built churches populated with the bodied souls of worshippers, and from that built a "haunted heaven" (line 3) populated with disembodied souls. Religion plays on people's moral sensibilities as their deliberations and actions involving right and wrong are decided and resolved through ceremony and ritual ("converted into palms" [line 11]), leaving them "hankering for hymns" [line 5]).
             In line 6, the speaker is saying that he and the old woman agree that indeed there is a fundamental human need for receiving guidance for living and an elemental human desire for giving thankful praise through worship. He comically proposes an alternative to religion ("The opposing law" [line 7]), to the prayers and hymns (and poems) that takes the form of a parade or festival-no doubt a mocking hint of the festivities that celebrated Christ's entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.
             The speaker surmises that even our most immoral acts can also be glorified and made purposeful through ceremony and ritual ("converted into palms" [line 11]) by staging them in an appropriate carnival-like
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