Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  ‘Sunday Morning’: Wallace Stevens’s Divine Stanzas, by Daniel Akst:

Sundays aren’t what they used to be, but then again when were they? The Christian sabbath was already losing primacy a century ago when an insurance lawyer by the name of Wallace Stevens published “Harmonium,” his first book of poems, and thereby unleashed on the world a set of eight extravagant stanzas titled “Sunday Morning.”

It’s hard to believe that anybody reading them in 1923 could ever look at Sunday mornings in the same light afterward. Stevens’s gorgeous meditation on the nature of divinity—and the human longing for “some imperishable bliss” in the face of mortality—is, among other things, a worldly rejection of the stringent Protestant sabbath of the poet’s youth.

Against the voluptuous sonorities and tropical paganism of Stevens’s iambs, the hard pews and tedious Sunday dinners of the 19th century never stood a chance. And the passage of time has done nothing to even out an unfair fight, or to blunt the unequivocal judgment of poet and critic Yvor Winters. “Sunday Morning,” he declared in 1943, “is probably the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and is certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English.”

By the time Stevens first published some of the stanzas, in 1915, it wasn’t altogether news that God was dead, for so Nietzsche had said. Born in 1879 and raised a Protestant, the poet himself shed his faith early. “I am not in the least religious,” he wrote in 1907. But the loss left him feeling “dispossessed,” and though he rarely attended services, he persisted in visiting churches, assuring a correspondent that “no one believes in the church as an institution more than I do.” …

Stevens knew well that religious practice unites faith and belonging, and that the loss of one can mean the loss of the other, along with the meaning and consolation that comes of faith’s community. Religion also provides an ethical framework that, once dismantled, is hard to replace. He later said that the “annihilation” of the gods had “left us feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents, in a home that seemed deserted.” In a faithless age, he argued rather unconvincingly, “it is for the poet to supply the satisfaction of belief.”

One wonders what he might have thought of secularism today. This year is the centennial of his great poem’s publication in full. Yet in grappling so imaginatively with the problems of freedom, spirituality and hedonism, “Sunday Morning” remains the timeliest possible sermon on the subject, as well as the most ravishing.

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