She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires.

These lines come from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning,” first published in 1915 (and later collected in his debut book, Harmonium). The poem stages a reflective conversation in which a woman, lingering at home on a Sunday, weighs sensuous earthly pleasures against inherited Christian promises of eternal salvation. Stevens wrote during a period of modernist rethinking of religious belief and metaphysical certainty; “Sunday Morning” is often read as an emblematic early statement of his secular, imagination-centered poetics. The quoted passage occurs as the speaker addresses the woman’s lingering desire for “imperishable bliss,” turning that longing toward a meditation on mortality as the condition that gives human experience its poignancy and value.

Stevens argues that the very finitude of life—its susceptibility to loss and ending—is what makes beauty possible and urgent. The woman’s wish for “imperishable bliss” represents a desire for permanence that would remove the sting of change; Stevens counters that fulfillment and desire gain their intensity from transience. “Death is the mother of beauty” reframes mortality not as mere negation but as the generative force that sharpens perception, deepens attachment, and makes moments precious. The passage thus advances a secular consolation: rather than seeking timeless perfection elsewhere, one can find meaning in the mortal world precisely because it passes away.