How and why is Christianity relevant to the meanings of Wallace Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning"?

Christianity is an enormously important theme in Wallace
Stevens' poem "Sunday Morning," as the very title of the poem implies. Christianity was
the dominant religion of the culture in which Stevens wrote, and so Stevens' poem, which
is an extended meditation on religion, inevitably discusses
Christianity.

As the poem opens, a complacent woman,
instead of being in church on Sunday morning, is relaxing at home, consuming "Coffee and
oranges in a sunny chair" (2). Yet it isn't long before she begins to think
about

silent
Palestine,

Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
(14-15)

It was in Palestine
that Christianity was born when Christ was crucified on the
cross.

In stanza II of the poem, the woman ponders the
attractions of natural beauty as an alternative to the demands of an ancient religion
that seems to have no strong connections to the palpable beauties of this present
earthly life:

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Why should she give her bounty to the
dead?

What is divinity if it can
come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
(16-18)

By the end of stanza
II, she seems to have arrived at an alternative to Christianity that anticpates some
recent "new age" beliefs: "Divinity must live within herself" (23). She also seems to
have imagined a natural alternative to traditional Christianity -- an alternative that
can embrace both the pleasant and unpleasant aspects of
nature:

All
pleasures and all pains, . . . [both]

The bough of summer
and the winter branch.
(28-29)

Stanza III briefly
(and somewhat mockingly) discusses the pagan religion of the Greeks, but then it
suggests that the Christian religion sought to unite the previously separate divine and
the human realms by inventing the god-man known as
Christ:

. . .
our blood, commingling, virginal,

With heaven, brought such
requital to desire

The very hinds [that is, the Biblical
shepherds] discerned it, in a star.
(36-38)

In stanza IV, the
speaker rejects a variety of different religious myths, including the Judeo-Christian
myth of paradise associated with "heaven's hill" (56). In place of these figments of the
human imagination, the speaker celebrates humanity's appreciation of the beauties of
nature, including the woman's

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. . . remembrance of awakened
birds,

Or her desire for June and evening,
tipped

By the consummation of the swallow's wings.
(58-60)

In stanza V, however,
the woman expresses the need of "some imperishable bliss" (62) -- some happiness that
will transcend mutability. In this stanza, however, the speaker suggests that an
awareness of death and mutability is precisely what causes humans to perceive beauty and
also create it.

In stanza VI, the speaker contrasts this
realistic perception of death with the fantasies of immutability offered by religions
such as Christianity: "Is there no change of death in paradise?"
(76).

Stanza VII celebrates "the heavenly fellowship / Of
men that perish and of summer morn" (102-03).

Finally,
stanza VIII returns to the heavy, explicit emphasis on Christianity found in stanza I
and offers this response to the woman's earlier
concerns:

. .
. "The tomb in Palestine

Is not the porch of spirits
lingering.

It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
(107-09)

In other words,
Jesus was not a god; he was a human being, and, like all human beings, he died. However,
his death did not diminish the value of his life. Death, after all, is "the mother of
beauty" (88), just as it is also the mother of any and all meanings, as this poem has
sought to show.