Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.

Stevens’s remark sets “Easter carol” (a conventional religious lyric) against what he calls the “activity of Spring in our blood,” i.e., the bodily, seasonal, and instinctive surge of renewal. Calling the carol “inane” suggests that, for him, such songs can flatten or sentimentalize a more primary experience of springtime vitality by forcing it into inherited doctrinal forms. The phrase “religious perversion” is less an attack on spring than on the way religious language can redirect or domesticate natural energies into prescribed meanings. In Stevens’s broader poetic outlook, imagination and direct perception often compete with received belief; here he implies that authentic renewal is physiological and worldly before it is theological.