Death is the mother of Beauty hence from her, alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires.

This line is spoken by a male voice in Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” first published in 1915 and later collected in his debut volume, Harmonium (1923). The poem stages a meditation on secular spirituality: a woman lingers at home on a Sunday morning, enjoying sensual comforts rather than attending church, and the poem tests what can replace Christian promises of immortality. In the section containing this line, the speaker argues that beauty and meaning arise not from eternal life but from transience—nature’s cycles, human finitude, and the poignancy that mortality gives to pleasure and desire.

Stevens’s paradox—death as “mother” of beauty—claims that finitude is what makes experience precious. If nothing ended, nothing would feel urgent, singular, or worth cherishing; permanence would flatten desire into indifference. By rooting “fulfillment” in mortality, the poem rejects otherworldly consolation and relocates value in the temporal world: the ripeness of seasons, the body’s pleasures, and the mind’s imaginative making of meaning. The line also suggests that longing and aesthetic intensity depend on loss and limitation; beauty is not despite death but generated by the awareness that what we love will pass.