Day 822: Sunday Morning Sonnet

'Sunday Morning Tea' ~ by Fenwick Parrody 

Source: Deviant Art

There's something special about Sundays isn't there? The feeling as Louis MacNeice puts it here of trying to 'abstract the day' and make it 'a small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme'. Sunday morning is 'Fate's great bazaar.' But also, there's an anxiety that overhangs Sunday of the return to the working week, the reminder that church bells echo at the end of the last stanza.

Sunday Morning - Louis MacNeice

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,

And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.