Ploughing on Sunday

Ploughing on Sunday is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923). It was first published in 1919 and is therefore in the public domain. [Buttel, p. 198] Some interpretations of this poem can be ranged on a continuum ofbrows, from low to high. Anchoring the low-brow extreme is thesuggestion [http://knitandcontemplation.typepad.com/dao_wallace_stevens/2004/10/index.html] that the poem is about sexual intercourse. The Oxford EnglishDictionary recognizes a sense in which "to plough" means"7. trans. Now slang. Usually of a man: to have sexual intercoursewith (a person, esp. a woman)". Its most recent citation for this useis "P. CAREY "Jack Maggs" (1998) xlvi. 167 Edward Constable hadbeen..reamed, rogered, ploughed by Henry Phipps so [that] he couldbarely walk straight to the table."

A middle brow is wagged by Helen Vendler when she writes about this poem, "There, while his docile neighbors troop off to church, the poet, violating the Sabbath,blasphemously harnesses his team to plough and takes to the fields,full of indiscriminate joy in the sun and wind alike..." [Vendler,p. 13.]

At the high-brow extreme is the thought that the poem isabout artists in North America imaginatively cultivating the reality of the New World withexuberant disregard for old European strictures. (Compare"The Paltry Nude Starts ona Spring Voyage", which Vendler interprets in high-brow fashion asbeing about "new American art".) Both the high- and middle-brow readings can acknowledge the symbolism of the sun as representing reality, the moon imagination.

Stevens described the poem as a "fanfaronnade" [Stevens, p. 338] and was accustomed to listening to
Dvořák, ["...I had the usual Sunday evening listening to a good deal of Dvorjak".] This is consistent with reading "Ploughing on Sunday" as a poetic fanfaronnade, a parallelto Dvořák's" Symphony Number 9"("From the New World"). Thisfits well with the high-brow reading, which also easily makes sense ofthe references to North America and Remus (as an allusion to the foundingof Rome), whereas the low- and middle-brow readings struggle on thesepoints. Environmentalists might agree that North America has been"rogered" by immigration and industrial development, but it's unlikelyStevens had that in mind. And if the poem were simply about the poet'sjoyfully exulting in his powers, why does North America (and a NorthAmerican gamebird) provide the context for that, rather than any othergeographical setting, such as Hartford, Connecticut or the Western Hemisphere?

The Stevenses observed the old custom of refraining from physical labor on Sundays, not even cooking. [Morse, p. 9.] This will be disturbing for those who analyze poetry by reference to biography; it would pose a problem for the middle-brow interpretation.

Buttel detects the influence of Walt Whitman in the poem's expansive wit, exaggeration, and its slap at the blue laws. [Buttel, p. 198] He also sees in the poem Stevens's awareness of rural and frontier America, and, "in Remus, to the Negroes and other reminders of the native folk tradition." [Buttel, p. 199]

Notes

References

• Buttel, Robert. "Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium". 1967: Princeton University Press.
• Stevens, Wallace. In Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. 1966: University of California Press.
• Vendler, Helen. "Words Chosen Out of Desire". 1984: University of Tennessee Press.
• Morse, Samuel French. "Wallace Stevens, Bergson, Pater". "ELH," Vol. 31, No. 1.