“Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens

Credit: goldenwillowretreat.org

In a recent interview with SevenPonds, Terri Daniel encourages us to imagine death as catalyst for new growth, new perspective, new knowledge, or whatever an individual accepts as a gift buried in a loss. Mortality does not have to dampen our zest for life. Rather, it inspires us to live fully: we cannot learn to live until we learn to die. The Tibetan Book of the Dead delivers this same message, and so does Wallace Stevens in “Sunday Morning”.

Published in his first collection, Harmonium (1923), the poem explores a post-Christian spirituality. With no certainty of heaven and hell to guide our spiritual and moral lives, how do we face the great unknown at the end of life? How do we console ourselves in a world where every single thing eventually disappears? “Death is the mother of beauty,” writes Stevens. Death quickens the soul and stimulates the imagination. If it isn’t easy to agree with him right away, he elaborates on this famous declaration with such depth of feeling that the poetry of it may be consolation enough for those who resist his claim:

“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.”

Yes, death conceals all the traces of our momentous or intimate feelings. But she also inspires them. Without death’s looming presence to impel maidens and boys, they would neither recognize nor revel in the sensual and aesthetic riches of the earth. Carpe Diem means nothing without mortality. Our own impermanence drives our will toward creation, artistic or otherwise. If we were not aware of our own ephemerality—if we believed we had all the time in the world to do everything–why would anyone strive to do anything at all? Change moves us to act. Stevens continues with a series of rhetorical questions that suggest how transience allows us the relief of change:

Wallace Stevens (credit: Wikipedia)

“Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.”

How drab an unchanging heaven seems! Like the native Californian who is tired of sunshine, can we also become too accustomed to any idea of heaven—no matter how wonderful it is—when experienced for the rest of eternity? And how disappointing it would be if heaven were simply a more pleasant version of life on earth.

Although he states elsewhere that earth should become all of the heaven that we should know, here Stevens conveys that death must be, aside from the impetus to live passionately, absolutely unknowable. It is the great blind spot on which we imagine our mother earth—or whatever mask the deity wears. Lack of knowledge on death fuels the imagination’s attempt to understand it. We console ourselves with our own beautiful visions of the end of life, and those visions tell us how to live. In other words, we should not separate life and death, or heaven and earth. By the sheer force of our abilities to dream and believe, we should unite them into a changing, mysterious whole.

What are your thoughts on the interplay between life and death? We look forward to your comments below.

More from The Next Chapter:

• Grief as a Gateway to the Divine
• The Empty Mirror and the Rainbow-Bird
• Walt Whitman’s “Whispers of Heavenly Death”