Sunday Morning Choices Quotes Page 1

The happiness that the woman feels while eating her breakfast doesn’t get rid of the pressure to think about the death of Christ, "that old catastrophe" – it just masks this pressure. When she starts to dream, though, the thought creeps up on her and "darkens" her pleasant day. These are the first lines to set up the choice that she has in the poem: between belief in a supernatural Christian heaven, or a devotion for the changing beauty of nature.

At the end of the first stanza, it seems like she will join the procession to Christ’s tomb, but, now, she strikes a defiant tone and chooses not to give up the pleasure of her oranges and cockatoo. Her first major decision in the poem is to declare that, "Divinity must live within herself" and her emotions. But, will she be happy with the consequences of this decision – specifically, the loss of the beautiful idea of Christian heaven?

Starting at stanza IV, the woman and the poet get into a sort of dialogue. In this quote, the poet responds to the woman’s concern that her vision of nature-as-paradise lasts only as long as the beautiful thing she experiences. The poet responds that "April’s green" has lasted longer than any religious ideas about heaven, because April comes back every year, but religions tend to fade away after however many hundreds of years. The poet is helping her to make a choice.