I recently had the chance to reread a little Wallace Stevens, specifically “Sunday Morning,” arguably Stevens’ most famous poem. My wife is in her first year of doctoral study in English literature, and she had to read several Stevens poems for a course she is taking. She actually almost bounded into the room after reading “Sunday Morning” and said, “I know you’ve read it before, but you have to stop what you are doing right now and read it again.” I made it two lines into the poem and knew she was right.

For anyone out there who isn’t up to speed on American modernist poetry, Stevens is kind of a big deal. He is a sort of nature poet, but contrary to what one might expect about environmental poetry he avoids the political.  Instead, writes about nature for nature’s sake. He famously wrote, “The world is the only fit thing to think about,” and his poetry demonstrates his attention to the natural world as an extension or a complement to humanity. His focus returns again and again to the natural world because he insists that “all of our ideas come from the natural world.” As a result of this view, Stevens’ poetry might be discussed most accurately as a philosophical treatise upon the relation of the human and the world as described in his poem “theory:” “I am what is around me.”

As an American literary giant, and possibly the most influential and important American poet of the 20^th century, Stevens was also an odd breed of writer, almost completely unique in our contemporary American canon. Stevens led a fascinating and rare sort of double life: he was both immensely successful as a businessman as well as a literary figure. Out of what seems to have been a driving desire to please his father, an attorney, Stevens went to law school and eventually went on to work for a prominent insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He traveled extensively, and many of his poems are located specifically in the places he went for business. In 1934, Stevens was named Vice President of Hartford Accident and Indemnity, which is just a couple of years before the bulk of his work began to be published. In 1955, the year of Stevens’ death, he received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry as well as an honorary doctor of letters degree from Yale. At the pinnacle of his professional life, Stevens produced the lion’s share of his most-admired work. He was traveling for the insurance business and for literary business, speaking at universities and teaching his theories on poetry. Perhaps the most incredible fact about Stevens is that he somehow managed to keep his two lives separate, so that when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, many of his closest colleagues in the insurance business were completely shocked that “Wally” had any sort of literary life at all.

But all of this is to say that “Sunday Morning” is, colloquially, a fucking amazing poem. Stevens captures perfectly a tone of religious nostalgia in which his subject, an unnamed She, is home on a Sunday morning and feeling pressing guilt for not attending church. The questions she poses of the poet are answered again and again with what is real and beautiful in this life on this earth. Stevens’ art, though, isn’t necessarily in the way he addresses questions of religion, but in how he crafts the images. He begins,

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.

He continues on with a sort of reimagining of all religion and myth, from Jove to Jesus, and his subject wonders if, without managing to remain a religious person, she’ll be able to find something to cling to. The poet answers her questions and points her to the present to find the things around her that are beautiful and which transcend everyday life with their inherent natural beauty. As her questions fade away, the poet concludes with a series of images of those things inherently beautiful in the natural world.  Those images replace her spiritual reservations and make her realize that, after all, the world can be your church.

We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.