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Clive James observes: “Whereupon, muttering ‘Thanks for nothing, lady’ with its dying gasp, it undoubtedly sank like a plummet.”

“what the poet never realizes is that seventy lines of this painstaking stuff are taking time: in the reader’s mind the fish is croaking while she runs the micrometer over it, making nonsense of the poem’s punch-line.”

Recalling the grief of Rachel in the bible, weeping for the exiled Israelites: “Thus saith the LORD; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not.”

Jeremiah 31: 15 (KJV)

ie Jesus' tomb is not a place of ressurection: it’s just a tomb.

The poem’s crucial question. Stevens wonders what comes next in the sequence that starts with Jove, a totally alien God, and then yields Christ, who is human as well as divine. Is this a process of dilution, which will end with our blood “failing” — ie, with religion of any kind gone from our lives? Or, on the other hand, is the story one of humanity ascending to assume the status of divinity? Shall human blood, not mingled with anything, become the blood of paradise?

Now we’ve moved away from paganism to Christianity, in which the divine essence is mixed with humanity in the person of Christ.

in this stanza, Stevens surveys religion, and ponders what will come next. He looks first at pagan religion, at Jove, the Roman name for the top god, who was as separate from people as people are from animals.

perhaps recalling Genesis 1:2 “The Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters”

This is going to be a post-Christian poem, but the idea of Palestine is still described in terms which give Christianity a powerful aura. The narrator gets to Palestine, in her imagination, by walking across the water like Christ. The theme of the poem will be: what is there that can carry the burden of that significance, now that Christianity no longer provides the order to the spiritual, awe-struck dimension of our lives. What can take up the slack?

She’s imagining a pagan ceremony — specifically the Dionysian rites/Bacchanalia which are what the word “orgy” signified before it took on the meaning of any generally or sexually licentious episode. ie the chanting men aren’t having sex at the same time. Necessarily.

calls back to “island solitude” — which is an etymological definition of the word “isolation”, which derives from the Latin for “island”.

the blue of a sky which hides no deity