"Waked in the elders by Susanna"

I think I've been putting off posting my thoughts on the Book of Susanna and Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier", because well, I felt I had been beaten to the punch. What could I say that hasn't already been said in someone else's blog? Then I just resolved to write about my own encounter with the two works, instead of specifically expounding upon the nature of music or beauty.

The Book of Susanna turned out to be an intriguing read, its brevity refreshing. A tightly constructed narrative for the period, I enjoyed it as both a folk motif and an early example of the courtroom drama archetype - Law & Order: Babylon. [Daniel's youth places the story as ostensibly during the exile in Babylon (footnotes 1471)] The use of Daniel as an Atticus Finch figure is particularly interesting.

Upon a first cursory reading of Steven's poem week before last, I wondered about the title's meaning. Not sure if it was mentioned in one of the classes I missed or in someone else's blog, but the poem's Wikipedia entry has a well-cited explanation:

The Peter Quince of the title is the character of one of the "mechanicals" in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Stevens' poem titles are not necessarily a reliable indicator of the meaning of his poems, but Milton Bates suggests that it serves as ironic stage direction, the image of "Shakespear's rude mechanical pressing the delicate keyboard with his thick fingers" expressing the poet's self-deprecation and betraying Stevens's discomfort with the role of "serious poet" in those early years.

(link)

Later readings inflicted me with a sense of musicality, which led to seek out the recordings made by Dominick Argento and Gerald Berg mentioned in the Wikipedia entry. A failure, unfortunately, they seem pretty obscure. Eight copies of the Dominick Argento album that includes musical scores of "Peter Quince at the Clavier" - An American Romantic (1979) - are for sale on Amazon, from $39.95 up to $155.44.

Apparently, the scene of Susanna and the Elders proved a popular subject in paintings. Central to the abundance of Susanna paintings was the easy justification of a nude female subject. I found these two, amongst others, on a cool blog that focuses solely on artistic depictions of women in the Bible:

http://bible-women.blogspot.com/

Top: Jacques Stella (1596-1657), French Classical painter

Above: Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856), French Romantic painter

I titled this blog with a quote summing up the passage that first really leapt out at me from Steven's poem.

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. It is like the strain

Waked in the elders by Susanna;

(lines 7-9)

Such a strong longing for beauty, whether musical or physical, experienced as feeling - sexual and otherwise. A musical sensuality, near explicit, "The basses of their beings throb" (line 13). Far more than the folk motif of an upstanding woman misjudged by society, Stevens transforms Susanna into musical metaphor, into metaphor for beauty as an inversion of Platonic universals summed up in the passage below:

Beauty is momentary in the mind -

The fitful tracing of the portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

(line 51-3)

Steven's beauty doesn't exist as a permanent form in the mind or separate from the physical world, but persists in immortal moments of impermanent flesh. The "strain" wakened in the elders by Susanna's beauty, regardless of their amoral intent, is immortal. By touching "the bawdy strings / Of those white elders" (lines 61-2), and then escaping their machinations, Susanna's music creates a "constant sacrament of praise" (line 66) playing in perpetual memory.