Wallace Stevens - Sunday Morning lyrics

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe
As a calm darkens among water-lights
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead
Winding across wide water, without sound
The day is like wide water, without sound
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings
Or else in any balm or beauty of the earth
Things to be cherished like
The thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch
These are the measures destined for her soul

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large mannered motions to his mythy mind
He moved among us, as a muttering king
Magnificent, would move among his hinds
Until our blood, commingling, virginal
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much
Friendlier then than now
A part of labor and a part of pain
And next in glory to enduring love
Not this dividing and indifferent blue

She says, "I am content when wakened birds
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings
But when the birds are gone
And their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy
Nor any old chimera of the grave
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirit's gat them home
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds
Or her desire for June and evenings, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings

She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss"
Death is the mother of beauty hence from her
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires although she
Strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang it's brassy phrase
Or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate the maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there
The silken weavings of our afternoons
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun
Not as a god, but as a god might be
Naked among them, like a savage source
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise
Out of their blood, returning to the sky
And in their chant shall
Enter, voice by voice
The windy lake wherein their lord delights
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills
That choir among themselves long afterward
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn
And whence they came and
Whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest

She hears, upon that water without sound
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirit's lingering
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay"
We live in an old chaos of the sun
Or an old dependency of day and night
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free
Of that wide water, inescapable
Deer walk upon our mountains, and 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