英文诗歌论文().doc

The Construction of a Secular Belief Analysis of the Poem Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens Introduction In Stevens’ opinion, in the times calling for belief, poets are responsible to provide some kind of belief through literature to satisfy readers. (蒲度戎，《英语诗歌欣赏》，重庆大学出版社) In Stevens’ times, religion seemed no longer capable of satisfying human’s need. The traditional religion is vacant because it deviates too far away from ordinary life. Just like artists of the Renaissance, Stevens turned his focus on the real secular life. However, he was so radical as to totally de-theologize the religious belief and put it directly on the basis of secular life. Stevens undertook such a task in his early poem, Sunday Morning, which demonstrates the bankruptcy of the old religious belief and the construction of a secular one. Body In the poem, Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens tries to reconstruct human belief. He wants to drive our belief from the traditional religion of Christianity to a new atheistic belief that is much closer to human life and nature. In other worlds, Stevens attempts to create a new belief in a realistic way. In my opinion, Stevens’ undertaking can be classified into two major tasks: to build a world without god and a paradise on our earth. I. The Disappearance of God i. Suspicions over God Firstly, he questions about the power and validity of god. In stanza II he writes: “What is divinity if it can come/Only in silent shadows and in dreams?” Divinity is not expected to merely appear ‘in silent shadows and in dreams’. It, as described by many kinds of religion, should lie everywhere and accompany every person at every moment. However, the god in the Bible does not exist somewhere in our life, but actually nowhere. Here, Stevens reveals that what is conventionally believed contradicts the reality. Stevens indicates that god is not to satisfy our need. In stanza III, he put god into a metaphor of ‘Jove’. He has an “inhuman birth”. “No mother suckled him, no swe