WINGS OF WALLACE STEVENS 137spruce and fir in the forests that take on the appearance of everglades.” (This
vision is a bit uncanny. Twenty years later he began following his imagination
to Florida.) Though hunting is “bloody difficult,” pushing through swamp
and slash and burned timber, his mind ’s eye keeps reaching: “The peaks to the
South shelve off into the heavens.... And the blue distances merge mountain
and sky into one.”
Responding to the wild North’s snow and endless forests, “I have seen”
mountains swimming in clouds, “I have seen” hundreds of wild ducks. Peaks
shelving off, blue distances merging, already act out his lifelong aim, “the great
poem of the earth”: to stretch our sense of the actual world, finding fresh faith
in a time when religious faith has faded.
Like Frost, Jeffers, Marianne Moore, and W. S. Merwin, Stevens had religious
roots, in his case the Pennsylvania Dutch community. He never lost touch with
that Puritan ethic and never stopped answering it with poems of earthly richness.
Most vibrant of all are the eight stanzas of “Sunday Morning.” They begin not
in church but in a woman’s bedroom:
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug...A sensuous sunniness and droll parrot ’s “green freedom” promote “any balm
or beauty of the earth” over divine dogma, releasing us from “blood and sep-
ulchre.” Because conflicts of earth and paradise, death and rebirth have lost
their grip, “Sunday Morning” steps in for the “silent shadows” of divinity, the
“cloudy palm / Remote on heaven’s hill.”
Stevens reconnects the created world—“April’s green,” “the swallow’s
wings,” “echoing hills”—to pagan humankind, with their “chant in orgy on a
summer morn.” Only when it ’s clear that “We live in an old chaos of the sun,”
not amid God ’s plenty but in an “island solitude, unsponsored, free,” does he
end this poem with Nature ’s plenty.
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.There you have it, abundant as Psalms—“The trees of the Lord also are full of
sap.... The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats”—but now “unsponsored,”
free of divine dependence.