138 PA RT T W O
Breathing into these lines, their verbal music feels devotional. A vocal excite-
ment, a sibilance as “the quail / Whistle about us their spontaneous cries,” leads
to psalmlike testimony: “Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness.” But that ’s it, a
perfect sentence as if grafted from Keats’s ode to Autumn, who comes to bless
the vines “And fill all fruits with sweetness to the core.” It was Keats Stevens
reckoned on, not our Lord rejoicing in His works.
In “Sunday Morning” Nature ’s varieties flourish with the lines’ inward va-
riety. No two have the same shape, so pauses come after one syllable (“And,”),
three (“At evening,”), five, or seven odd-numbered syllables reaching toward
the next strong beat while the sentence evolves. Familiar subject-verb events—
deer walk... quail whistle... berries ripen—give way to a slower movement
as the pigeons sink wavelike to darkness. Whether by chance or the poet ’s gift
doesn’t matter, when the only ripples of an extra syllable in these lines belong
to “spontaneous,” “casual,” “ambiguous”—signs of how little dominion we
have, how unknowing we are, though we speak of “our” mountains and quail
whistling “about us.”
The poet ’s long final sentence unscrolls a natural event, evening flocks of
pigeons, that ultimately sinks out of our ken:
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.“Isolation,” by what gauge? Evening sky can be simply that, empty of any tran-
scendent presence. These undulations are “casual” and “ambiguous” in our sight
but not the pigeons’, certainly. And not, in a way, the poet ’s.
As the lines descend, their phrasings vary with the birds’ own movement
along a trail of crisp consonants—the k-sound in “sky” passing through “ca-
sual,” “flocks,” and “make” toward “sink,” surer than any outright rhyme. The
pigeons as they “sink, / Downward to darkness” carry that kheard finally in
“extended.” And as “sink” nearly sings to rhyme the poem’s last word, those
extended wings hold up, slow up for the mind ’s eye, an otherwise vanishing
beauty.
Like Keats in autumn, when “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day” and
“gathering swallows twitter in the sky,” Stevens finds for life and death an
earthly music, the extended wings of sound and rhythm—his response to “the
verve of earth.”
A trio of mettlesome poets, born within a few years of each other, fought
from the 1920s onward for an American imagination “creating or finding and
revealing” new reality, “a part of unprecedented experience.” Stevens praised
Marianne Moore with these words, speaking for his own aims as well. Likewise