"Sunday Morning" at 100

"Wallace Stevens�s �Sunday Morning� (1915) is a lofty poetic meditation�almost a philosophical discourse�rooted in a few basic questions: what happens to us when we die? Can we believe seriously in an afterlife? If we can�t, what comfort can we take in the only life we get? As World War I intensified and Stevens neared middle age, he broached these subjects with quiet urgency in a poem as beautiful as it is difficult. 

Although �Sunday Morning� is considered Stevens�s breakthrough poem, it wasn�t published until he was 36. It debuted in Poetry magazine during a year that brought several other Modernist milestones, including T.S. Eliot�s �The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,� Marianne Moore�s first professionally published poems, and a major Imagist anthology coedited by the poets Richard Aldington and H.D. Compared with these experiments by younger writers�and with many of the poems later collected in Stevens�s first book,  Harmonium (1923)��Sunday Morning� innovates in a mellower and statelier mode. "

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The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

A Mind of Winter

Welcome to December! Do you have a mind of winter yet?


The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

by Wallace Stevens

via https://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15745 



The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens