Sunday Morning

One of my favorite poets, Wallace Stevens, experienced profound regret towards the end of his life for his lack of spiritual commitment. I give you a fragment of his poem, Sunday Morning, as an illustration of his poignant reflections.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

(photo by me.)

Memory and Imagination

My husband tells me that visiting Vermont in the winter helps him understand the New England poets better. "Robert Frost?" I ask him. "No, I was thinking of Wallace Stevens' The Snow Man. You get a sense of his search for meaning."

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

But the difference between us and the snow man is that we have memory and imagination. We know the cycles of snow, grass, flowers, fireflies and frost. The seasons change and it'll be spring again.