Early Sunday Morning: Alienated Majesty

Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning, Whitney Museum of American Art

This is the third ekphrastic poem I've written on the work of Edward Hopper. This Miltonic (caudate) sonnet was published recently in Mezzo Cammin, Volume 11, Issue 2.

Bon dimanche!

Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts;

they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

There’s something comforting and intimate

            about the line of small shops in the glare

            of Sunday morning. Something clean and spare,

            bounded, but suggesting infinite

extent. Then all at once we take a hit

            to the solar plexus— we become aware

            of storefront windows whispering beware,

            and that the quietude is counterfeit.

The atmosphere is placidly bereft,

            devoid of movement or of mortal face;

            the softened desolation of the street

suggests a hyper-emptiness, a trace

            of absent presences, a bittersweet

            tristesse, as though humanity's been left

                                    alone to face the heft

of enigmatic darkness to the right,

a monolith that leads our line of sight—

                                    through Hopper's scumbled light—

away from consolation to concern

as we approach our point of no return.

-- Catherine Chandler (2016)