1915 ‘Dear Miss Monroe’, Stevens wrote to the already legendary founder editor of Poetry magazine, a force (usually for good) in the campaign for American modern – and modernist – poetry:
Provided your selection of the numbers of Sunday Morning is printed in the following order: I, VIII, IV, V, I see no objection to cutting down. The order is necessary to the idea.
I was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, am thirty-five years old, a lawyer, reside in New-York [sic] and have published no books.
Clearly Mr Nobody from Reading, PA didn’t need such careful handling as Amy Lowell and Carl Sandburg, whose work would also appear in that same issue of Poetry, Vol. 2, No. 7 (November 1915). In the event, Harriet Monroe accepted the forced arrangement, while disastrously allowing him a further stanza – VII in the canonical version – to end on. It’s the least good segment of the poem as we know it, and certainly doesn’t belong at the end, since it’s a young man’s exotic fantasy of what might take the place of conventional religion:
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant an orgy on a summer morn …
‘Sunday Morning’ begins with a woman enjoying ‘Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair’, musing on the ‘holy hush of ancient sacrifice’ that Sunday commemorates in the Christian faith. The poem is a hedonist’s meditation on what lives after death, when the standard religious consolations no longer engage the imagination.
The answer, after seven stanzas – almost movements – is to relish change, the ‘Passions of rain, or moods of falling snow … Elations when the forest blooms; gusty / Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights; / All pleasures and all pain …’ – to take pleasure in the short-livedness of beauty.
The eighth ‘movement’ restates the predicament and its solution:
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.
Or rather, in stating the predicament it demonstrates the solution. With such a powerful complex of images – with modifiers like ‘spontaneous’, ‘isolation’ and ‘ambiguous’ restating the lack of a conventional ‘divine’ plan, and with the near-rhyme of ‘make’, ‘sink’, ‘wings’ reinforcing the expressive rhythm caught in those heavy stresses on ‘DOWNward’ and ‘DARKness’ – the predicament becomes a pleasurable aesthetic experience in itself, proving and enacting the consolation argued discursively earlier in the poem.
That’s why it needed to come at the end of ‘Sunday Morning’, and why it was a shame that Stevens had to put it second (after the woman in her peignoir) as a way of getting the poem into print. Fortunately it reverted to its original form in his first collection, Harmonium (1923), and has stayed like that ever since.