The Peignoir, the Parrot, and the Death of Heaven: Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”

A woman in a peignoir, a green parrot, and the absence of God: Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” share a startling constellation of images. This essay reads them together as meditations on beauty, mortality, and the secular sublime.