Ploughing On Sunday - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

The poem presents a vigorous rural scene rendered in brisk, musical lines. Its tone is celebratory and energetic, with a repeated, almost ritualistic refrain that shifts between playful music and earthbound labor. There is a persistent sense of movement—wind, feathers, water, and ploughing—that carries the poem forward. A slight tension appears between sacred time and worldly action, hinted by the refrain about ploughing on Sunday.

Context and authorial background

Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet often engaged with imagination versus reality and with how the mind shapes experience. The poem’s rural imagery and invocation of North America may reflect Stevens’s interest in transforming commonplace scenes into symbolic or imaginative experience rather than a detailed historical or social critique.

Main theme: Work, ritual, and celebration

The poem frames ploughing as both labor and festive ritual. The repeated lines I'm ploughing on Sunday, Ploughing North America turn agricultural work into a proclamation. The exhortation Remus, blow your horn! and the onomatopoeic Tum-ti-tum give the work a musical, communal quality, suggesting that toil is integrated with celebration rather than merely utilitarian drudgery.

Main theme: Nature’s dynamism and sensory imagery

Stevens uses vivid images of feathers, wind, sun, moon, and water to make nature feel tactile and kinetic. Phrases like The feathers flare And bluster in the wind and the alternating Streams to the moon and Glitters in the sun create a sensory pattern of sight and motion. The recurring image of water in fields grounds the poem in agrarian reality while the flaring feathers animate the landscape.

Main theme: Sacred time versus secular action

Ploughing on Sunday introduces a subtle conflict between religious observance and practical necessity or joyful irreverence. The imperative and celebratory tone undermines a strict sense of Sabbath restraint, suggesting a redefinition of the sacred as found in creative, communal labor rather than in repose alone.

Symbols and recurring images

The turkey-cock’s and white cock’s tails recur and shift between sun and moon, suggesting dualities—day and night, public display and private motion, earthly and luminous realms. The horn and the Tum-ti-tum motif function as calls to action or music that sacralize the ploughing. Water in the fields both literalizes irrigation and symbolically evokes fertility, continuity, and reflection.

Concluding insight

Ploughing on Sunday celebrates the fusion of labor, music, and the natural world, proposing that communal, embodied action can be a form of sacred expression. Through rhythmic refrains and vivid natural images, Stevens transforms a simple rural scene into a small ritual of American vitality and imaginative renewal.