Sunday Morning Analysis

Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. Never fear, Shmoop is here. Check out our...

Eight-Stanza Poem in Blank VerseStevens doesn’t write a lot of poems as structured as this one. Maybe it has to do with the fact that "Sunday Morning" is one of the first poems he published:...

Have you ever been around the kind of old married couple where one person always speaks on behalf of the other person? You’ll ask the wife something, for example, and the husband will answer,...

After a long, cold winter, it’s finally springtime in some pretty New England town. (At least, we’re guessing it’s New England, because there are wild berries and Stevens lived th...

What do Wallace Stevens and hip-hop music have in common? Rhythm, and lots of it. In both "Sunday Morning" and a hip-hop song, the rhythm matters at least as much as the words. A hip-hop singer is...

"Sunday Morning." A pretty straightforward title, right? But, it provides information about the setting that we otherwise wouldn’t know from reading the poem. If you hadn’t read the tit...

Beautiful, totally confusing imagesAt a lot of points in this poem, you might find yourself thinking, "Wow, that’s an amazing image. Now, what the heck is he talking about?" What does it mean...

(8) Snow LineIt's extremely difficult trying to figure out what every line means. Some of the images are crazy-confusing, and even Stevens’s editor at Poetry magazine couldn’t figure th...

In his letters, Stevens wrote that "Sunday Morning" was "simply an expression of paganism." (Source: Stevens, Holly. Letters of Wallace Stevens. 1966: University of California Press. Pg. 290.)Steve...

PG-13Most of the poem is as tame as a nature documentary, but, at a couple of places, things get a little interesting. First, you have the boys who put fruit out on a plate to lure beautiful maiden...

Literature, Philosophy, and MythologyJove, the chief god of Roman mythologyHistorical ReferencesJesus Christ