Harmonium offered readers a very different version of "Sunday Morning" from the one they had seen in Poetry in 1915. In Poetry, the fifth and final stanza, now recognized as the seventh stanza, had expressed the exalted paganism of "a ring of men" chanting "Their boisterous devotion to the sun." This ecstasy of human physical feeling, the only divinity of humankind, would then be recreated and sustained by echo throughout the environment. In Harmonium, however, this ringing affirmation of human and natural coexistence was no longer the poem's final emphasis.

"Sunday Morning" offers one of Stevens's first substitutes for Christianity: natural religion, or paganism. Stevens said very little about this poem after writing it, other than to note in 1928 that "the poem is simply an expression of paganism" (LWS, 250) and later, in 1944, to indicate that Hi Simons was correct in assuming that the poem suggests "a naturalistic religion as a substitute for supernaturalism" (LWS, 464). Stevens tended to dismiss questions about or interpretations of this poem.

"… [I]n an age of disbelief, we play the role of the actor as well. Stevens emphasizes the point by saying that the audience, hearing the actor’s words, "listens, / Not to the play, but to itself," thus becoming actor and audience at once. The entire movement of the poem is toward the moment of creative fusion in the mind, "as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one." The actor’s sole responsibility – and by analogy, the poet’s – is to discover the text that will provoke this degree of imaginative sympathy, which may draw upon the whole range of human activity:

But in "Of Modern Poetry," written two years before, and later in "Burghers of Petty Death," we find men and women together, more successfully figured as equal representatives of humanity. "Modern Poetry," Stevens says, "has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time." In the second poem, written in 1946, Stevens says:

These are the small townsmen of death,

A man and a woman, like two leaves

That keep clinging to a tree,

Before winter freezes and grows black--

His Collected Poems is not the book a reader might expect from the author of these appealing lines about what modern poetry requires:

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time ...

                                    It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

"[Stevens experiences] a relative ease in sailing toward a mystical negativa, or in bringing a playful exercise in negation to a paradoxical conclusion. The labor is in confronting the banal, unornamented, unswept scene. It is not in the visionary fireworks of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" that Stevens takes up the challenge of a depressive reality but in a much shorter poem of the same period. "The Plain Sense of Things," cast as a reflective narrative in the manner of Frost, comes as close to an "existential ordinary" as a Stevens poem will get.

Instead of evoking the plain sense of things by creating a construct, Stevens evokes the outer in "Plain Sense" by imagining not simply the absence of any construct, but the absence of the faculty that creates the constructs. Paradoxically, though, the imagining of the absence of the imagination is itself a powerful expression of the creative activity of the imagination, "the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined" (CP 503). The poem seems to uncover the plain sense of things through a kind of creative anticreativity, the imagination imagining its own absence.

""As You Leave the Room" was apparently completed a year after "On the Way to the Bus" [reprinted in Opus Posthumous, p. 136]. Its first eight or nine lines may have been written as early as 1947, according to the conjecture of Samuel French Morse, editor of Opus Posthumous. But the last seven lines appear to refer specifically to "On the Way to the Bus." Stevens has again been calling his life as poet to account and wondering if it has not all been misspent in pursuit of an illusion.

The ambiguity of the word "still" points to the integrity of Stevens, who does not attempt to hide from anxiety inherent in self-consciousness. A comparison of "First Warmth" and "As You Leave the Room" is revealing here. The first poem says,

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,

As a questioner about reality,

 

A countryman of all the bones of the world?

Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes

 

Part of the major reality, part of

An appreciation of a reality;

 

Stevens' last poems are distinguished by a broad serenity; this one was published in 1954, the year before he died.