Sunday Morning

While Stevens doesn’t use either the term “immanence” or “transcendence” in “Sunday Morning,” the tension between the two helps define the text. Immanence is the state of being within a thing, in this case, the world. The list that begins the poem is a list characterized by immanence: a “peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” (Lines 1-2) all exist within the world that is at the fingertips of the woman in the text. Transcendence, on the other hand, is a state of exceeding the limits of a thing, in this case, the world or human understanding. The transcendent is exemplified by the divine (at least, in traditional Western thought). The “holy hush of ancient sacrifice” (Line 5) that intrudes on the breakfasting woman’s morning is an example of the otherworldly mysteries of religious transcendence. When “Jove” appears in the poem, it is as an example of transcendence. The god “in the clouds” (Line 31) is not from this world: He “had his inhuman birth” (Line 31), lacked an earthly “mother [to] suckle[] him” (Line 32), and had “no sweet land” (Line 32) in which to grow but the otherworldly heavens.

The sequence of these concepts’ appearance is crucial to their rhetorical place in the text.