Peter Quince

"Peter Quince," the title character and speaker from Stevens' poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier," meditates on music and relates a story about a mysterious "Susanna." First, Quince claims that, like the music he makes on the keyboard, the "self-same sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too," equating music with feeling rather than sound. His desire, therefore, for an unnamed "you" in the poem becomes a kind of music. He analogizes this statement by positing that this desire and music is "like the strain/ Waked in the elders by Susanna...," a reference to a similar story in the Old Testament "Book of Daniel." The rest of the poem explicates her story in an effort to draw out this simile. Susanna awakens desire and lust in the "elders," who attend her fictional bath despite being an unwanted presence. In an off-scene moment--an exchange between Susanna, her "attendant Byzantines," and the elders--a crisis emerges (with the suggestion on a rape or other violent intrusion) that "Reveal[s] Susanna and her shame." Quince concludes that "Beauty is momentary in the mind...But in the flesh it is immortal," and draws out the concept that flesh is transigent and corruptible, while the idea of beauty contained in the body it eternal and renewable, though perhaps only glimpsed or realized in a moment. Susanna's "music," then--the feelings her beauty engenders in the elders and others--"Left only Death's ironic scraping" but became the annunciation of "immortality" in Quince.
As the poems speaker, Peter Quince is both musician and poet, and he intermingles the language and imagery of music, feeling, and verse to create a complex landscape of desire, narrative, and meditation. Like many other Stevens' poems, this one ultimately suggests poetry as the location where fundamental life forces--the "feeling" of music that gets equated with desire--are expressed and composed.