I was reading Wallace Stevens' - "Sunday Morning", which I have read many times over the years. William Stafford once said that you really don't "understand the meaning" of a poem until you have a "readiness" within yourself.

The death metaphor struck me this time as no other. I think before I was too caught up with the feeling of death as physically dying!

In the stanza VI he writes,

Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Like Faust going down to the "realm of the mothers" there is emancipation in giving up the the old sentimental mother (attachments to 'what about me?') - for the mother - like the Indian Kali or Russian Baba-Yaga - the Creator and Destroyer, "who waits sleeplessly."

In stanza VIII (the last) he writes,

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

The "lingering spirits" again perhaps attachments to sentimental wants, but letting go into the death of that - understanding the death of Jesus as archetype of sacrifice - becoming the pigeon with its "ambigous undulations" winging into darkness.

Its about getting over it - dying so we finally get it - finally grow.

You think?