“Where have I seen before, against the wind, / These bright virgins, robed and bare of bonnet?” the narrator of John Crowe Ransom's “Vision by Sweetwater” wonders of the young visitors to his aunt's farm. He has “seen” them in the Apocrypha account of Susanna and the elders, a fact that elucidates the meaning of this otherwise bewildering poem.

Lust is the link between Ransom's poem and the Susanna story. What seem mere “girls” to the aunt are “like a dream of ladies sweeping by” to the coming-of-age narrator. Though just dawning, his sexual yearning is as ancient as the elders' inflamed desire to violate the pure and innocent Susanna. Like the elders, he voyeuristically observes the unaware objects of his lust as they prattle in “their strange quick tongue.” Susanna is oblivious to the hiding elders as she bathes in her garden, and Ransom's boy is an ignored but enthralled auditor of the “little colony of hens” who “tinkled light as wrens”—blithely vulnerable virgins reminiscent of Susanna with her handmaidens.

One of the girls in “Vision” is singled out as “my Aunt's lily daughter.” Not only does the adjective stress her lust-enhancing purity, but it also suggests that Ransom may have consciously used the Apocrypha parallel: “Susanna” means “lily” in Hebrew.

That Ransom's fetching females are viewed near water may be what calls up Susanna's memory from the dark recesses of the narrator's mind. Just as the elders watch Susanna in her pastoral bath, Ransom's protagonist associates his haunting reminiscence with “The willows, clouds, deep meadowgrass, and the river.” He recalls watching the visiting maidens “adventuring with delicate paces by the stream.” While there is nothing so sexually blatant as disrobing in “Vision” (the girls are “robed” though provocatively “bare of bonnet”), the reiterated river parallels the setting of Susanna's unwittingly seductive act—an aquatic scene that prompts Ransom's narrator to “go fishing in the dark of [his] mind” for an understanding of what he has seen, heard, and felt at baptismal Sweetwater.

The strongest evidence of the Susanna myth occurs at the poem's climax, where the bucolic scene is pierced by a sudden “scream / From one of the white throats which it hid among.” The cause of the scream is unspecified, as is which throat produces it, but it parallels Susanna's cry of alarm upon discovering the elders, and “white” may suggest that it comes from the “lily” cousin, possibly the primary object of the narrator's desire, his “Susanna.” But perhaps it is uttered by the heretofore pure young narrator himself, a psychic cry of sexual initiation for the budding elder, “a child, old suddenly at the scream.”

Ransom may have been as dimly conscious of the ghosts of Susanna and the elders in “Vision by Sweetwater” as his protagonist seems to be, but the poem clearly interweaves three “visions”: the narrator's literal observation of the “bright virgins” who visited his aunt's farm, his dreamlike remembrance of the Apocrypha parallel, and the fearful revelation of his sexual manhood. The mythic story of the elders' lust for Susanna unites these visions.