Nobody in Loe's Sunday morning is going to church, or at least nobody the poem lets us see. Instead of hymns and sermons we get a cough, a sigh, a man trimming his beard and a few buds pressing on glass. The central idea is that the sacred can be found in the ordinary physical world, in skin, sap and breath, and that this is both comic and quietly serious. The title promises a specific morning, and the poem delivers it as a series of glimpses, like a camera drifting from a doorstep to a bathroom mirror to a street.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. What holds it together is punctuation. The slashes work like small hinges inside the lines, and the poem starts on one: "A cough / a sigh." They make the reader pause the way a breath does, so the syntax feels exhaled rather than composed. The dashes add another kind of hesitation, most clearly in "The sky is pure — the body whiter," where a comparison is held for a beat before it lands. Line length shifts too. The long, spreading lines of the opening contract to the short "Girls clad in breath," which hangs there almost weightless.
Loe's imagery crosses the senses. Wind-chimes are made for hearing, yet here they "sparkle in diadems of sunlight," so sound turns into light and the light becomes a crown. "Diadems" is a deliberately grand word, and it sits beside "newspapers pile up outside the door-step," the unread, forgotten news of a day when the world seems to have stopped. The piled papers suggest that no one is bothering with the outside world, and that the real news is happening in the body and the garden.
The naked man is the poem's comic centre. He "thinks he looks like Jesus Christ," and the verb matters, because the poem never confirms it. We are left with his private vanity, which is gentle and funny but not mocking. Then the language swerves: "His waxen anatomy planes of cosmology and heredity." The line has no real verb, and "planes" could be a noun (flat surfaces, levels) or a verb (skimming, sweeping). Either way, the body is being read as a map of the universe and of family inheritance. "Waxen" adds pallor and stillness, and it also brings in candles, so the body becomes both a figure in a museum and an object of worship. The morning's religion has moved from the pew to the mirror.
The second half widens into nature, and the language gets more sensual. "Sap oozes into the tips of tree-branches / ornamental buds rub against the window." Judging by the imagery, this is a season of waking, perhaps early spring. The buds press against the window, so the natural world is pushing at the edge of the domestic one, just as the body pushes against the idea of purity. Then comes "The sky is pure — the body whiter." The sky is the usual symbol of the spotless, but the poem lets the human body outdo it. The whiteness is ambiguous, though. It can mean cleanness, but it can also mean exposure or the pallor of the wax figure.
The ending brings in "girls clad in breath," who "pass / stand still like the hummingbird." The hummingbird is a good choice, since it is the one creature that is moving and motionless at once, and the slash between "pass" and "stand still" acts that out. "Clad in breath" turns breath into clothing, a lovely and slightly chilly image. A careful reader might notice, however, that the girls are only watched. They get no voices or thoughts, only a graceful simile, which makes them part of the scenery in a poem where the man at least has a vanity of his own.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone. It borrows the vocabulary of religion (Sunday, Christ, diadems, purity) and applies it to a beard, a branch and a breath, without ever deciding whether this is a joke or a devotion. It seems to be both, and that uncertainty is what keeps the short poem interesting.