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Sunday Morning

 

            On Sunday Morning many religious people go to church. Other people just stay at home and watch television. Yet there are another people that are between these two groups. These people sit at their kitchen table and think about why they have to go to church to worship. In Wallace Stevens poem "Sunday Morning" the character is a woman at breakfast on a sunny Sunday morning, while her neighbors are at church, thinking about why they should or should not go to church. The poem demonstrates how you do not have to go to church to worship.
             The poem "Sunday Morning" is memorable for its vivid use of color and action imagery. It is also memorable for its romantic evocation of the natural world. "Sunday Morning" consists of 8 self contained, 15 line strophes. A blank verse of the civilest kind establishes the quality of the experience. The setting is a woman's Sunday morning when relaxation and vibrant colors are dissipated by the call of religious services. The poem uses the figures of the woman to work through the objections to her discarding of Christianity. The poem develops on an argument between two voices; the tentative questioning voice of the woman is the main voice. The other voice is what the majority of the people want.
             There are two main themes that are trying to be applies. The first theme is "stasis can provide only boredom where as changes brings delight. The second more important theme is the idea that "human perception of beauty requires the recognition that everything earthly is temporary." The images in the poem combine to give a stereoscopic view of life-in-death and death-in-life.
             What saddens the speaker the most is not only that the flesh is impermanent and sexual pleasure passes and diminishes but that the desire remains with no attainable object. The religion available is said to "Only in silent shadows and dreams." The freedom the woman has won by getting rid of her Christian faith provides no real compensation except a sense of the ability of all nature.


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