Servant Poetry

I
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.

II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.

III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment 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.

VI
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.

VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
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.

Note: This is the later and more definitive version of “Sunday Morning.” Read the first published version of this poem, which appeared in Poetry magazine. In 1915, editor Harriet Monroe asked Stevens to cut several stanzas for Poetry, and Stevens would later restore these cut stanzas when he published the poem in book form in 1923. Source: The Collected Poems (1954).

* * *

Sunday Morning Revisited

G. E. Reynolds (1949– )

For Wallace Stevens

I
The morning is a rush, whether
Or not I preach—well ironed
Shirts and Windsor knotted ties
With contemplation of the dignity
Of the day, and sometimes a close
Reading of a text and manuscript
As sunshine often streaks across the
Page to accent the meaning
Of the words, etching in my mind
The gravity and splendor of my task,
Fortified by crisp bacon and perfect
Eggs, only on Sunday morning.

II
Other days are oatmeal days
For cardiac strength, but my heart
On Sunday morning is buttressed
By the sheer and strenuous beauty
Of the penetrating Word of God
That recounts the ancient sacrifice
That illuminates this day of days,
Dissipating the evanescent world
With all its baubles and enchantments—
Vanity fair delusions with dreams
Of Paradise rooted in this
Present evil age—passing bliss.

III
On our way to worship we pass
The donut shop with Hopper essences
And plastic features accentuating
The ersatz dream that enthralls us
All, unless the darkness is impaled
By the cross’s oblique victory,
Unearthly hope where despair
Seemed to hold the day. Then
Cloudy, stormy, or fair weather seems
Unimportant in light of the message
Overreaching the immanent day.
Bleakness does not win now.

IV
Then worship overshines the maelstrom
Of modernity—yes, the demon of
The day is mastered by the presence
Of the Lamb who comforts and
Condemns, at once intrudes his
Person to confirm that he
Is no longer dead as unbelief asserts.
Stevens assumes he is still dead,
But witnesses affirm he is alive
Having stormed his tomb
And contradicted all his foes
With lustrous resurrection.

V
The suppliant has overcome
The sybarite as we celebrate
The wakening cues that energize
The pilgrims on our exodus from
This present life to the bliss that
Awaits each traveler in the wilderness
We now endure with its temporal
Blessings which we enjoy. I often
Look out to see the floating
Fields of hay as I worship
And see the glory of God
In this present fleeting world.

VI
Wallace, you had eight stanzas
Seeming to desire an imperishable
Bliss, some intangible hope
Of something more than this
Present field of temporary joys.
How can death be the mother
Of beauty when it goes down
To darkness in the end? How
Can this be a good Sunday morning?
No, you missed this in your youth,
For perhaps there was only
An austere remembrance for you then.

VII
Now I propose a different Sunday
Morning, not of mourning the chaos
Of the sun as you do—God help us,
For the picture He presents is
Of a coming morning of the Son
In which the birds of Paradise arise
Like larks at break of day to usher in
The hymns at heaven’s gate
That bring the wealth of Gospel
News that heartens singers in the pews
To dampen all the darkened views
That this drear world imbues.

VIII
Here is the proffered Paradise
Of perfect peace of the Lord’s Day
Lord, when the marriage feast
Of the Lamb will be reality,
This is the swallowing of death
When all wrongs will be
Righted and the finest wine and
Wheat will be enjoyed by the poor and
The needy, and all crying will be
Quenched by the mercy of the Lord—
Bliss will be enjoyed by every
Follower of the Lamb slain for them.

And raised to bring bliss, not darkness
On the wings of the Sun of righteousness.

Ordained Servant Online, October, 2023.