In the Library
Sunday Morning
Wallace Stevens, 1923
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 1k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
Death is the mother of beauty
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Whitman does the same thing, but louder: a pagan hymn to the sensory body as its own divinity, sung in unrhymed, breath-length American verse.
£1.99
Ode on a Grecian Urn
John Keats
Keats does the same thing, but through a single frozen urn instead of a Sunday terrace, arguing that beauty and mortality are one discovery.
£1.99
Because I could not stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
Dickinson does the same thing, but lets Death arrive in person, a courteous coachman, instead of staying an abstract argument over Sunday coffee.
£1.99
About the book
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, the green freedom of a cockatoo on the rug, a late Sunday morning with nowhere to be. Then the ease curdles, and the woman in her peignoir feels the dark encroachment of an old catastrophe reach across the water, a hush of ancient sacrifice she was supposed to have left behind, and she wants to know what the living owe the dead. Stevens hands her no god. What he hands her instead is the loveliest heresy in American poetry: that paradise would be intolerable because nothing there could ripen or fall, that boughs which hang forever heavy are boughs nobody loves. Death is the mother of beauty. The poem does not argue the line so much as feed it to you, in deer walking the mountains, quail whistling, berries going sweet in the wilderness. It ends with pigeons at dusk, sinking, and offers no comfort except the light still on them as they go down.