References to music abound in the poem. Some musical references are stated obviously, and others lie embedded in puns. On the narrative level, the word “music” is repeated four times in the first six lines of the poem, in which a speaker is seated at a keyboard. Other direct musical references (“melody,” “chords,” “choral,” and “play,” as in play upon a violin) combine with a host of musical instruments—clavier, viol, basses, cymbals, horns, and tambourines. These references are further compounded by “strains,” “pizzicati,” “pulse,” “springs,” “winds,” “breath,” “refrain,” “flowings,” and even “scrapings” (as of a violin badly bowed). The poet says outright that “thinking of your blue-shadowed silk/ Is music.”

A reader’s awareness of all these compounded references, however, does not make the poem easier to understand. In fact, awareness can add to the complication and bewilderment readers feel when they try to make sense of it. The poem’s opening narrative takes place in a parlor, where a lover is making love at the keyboard. Immediately, the poem jumps to a mythic time (part II) in which a woman is made love to by bawdy, red-eyed elders (later, “white elders”). The poem seems to guide readers to a reconciliation of these two opposing images. Such reconciliation is not found in the immediacy of a story line or in the argument at the end. Stevens elsewhere stated his beliefs in “new ways of knowing.” On the simplest level, this poem requires that readers find in its formal elements, involving associations of words and narratives, a new way of knowing an old story that, in the Apocrypha at least, seems to be about lust and treachery. Formally, one is presented with a way of knowing Susanna’s story by the juxtaposition of a modern lover (presumably young) with those ancient thin-blooded, lecherous old men. He seems to hint that he is somewhat like these old men in the tale. His puns help him explain himself.

All lovers feel the “strain” of love, whether they feel it in a genteel way (as a strain of music) or in a more physical way—the strain in copulation and sexual performance. Lust in the old is less of a physical strain than the act itself is; lust for the young is more of a musical strain, and lovemaking is easier. Stevens was a master of serious puns. His pun on “strain” allows readers to suppose (in III) that the old men may have tried and failed at rape; they resorted to accusations when their own desire failed. The “uplifted flame” of passion reveals only the shame of lust, not the act itself. When the simpering attendants flee the scene, their tambourines make no music, only noise. Without true feeling there can be no music. When readers understand this, Peter’s first puzzling statement (in I) becomes much clearer: Music is not sound; music is feeling.

Susanna herself (in II) seems to intuit what Peter knows without speaking a word on her own behalf. A repeated subject/verb refrain forms a kind of scaffolding for section II: “Susanna lay./ She searched// And found// She sighed,//she stood// She walked . . .// She turned.” Balancing these subject/verb constructions are the less active and more tentatively worded lyrical phrases—the quavering of a different sensibility in Susanna’s reality—the music felt beyond sound. She is counterpart to male certainty and forced entry—the crashing cymbals and roaring horns. These cymbals and horns are the noise of desire that can be heard if Susanna’s complement of music is overridden.

Stevens takes a phrase such as “touch of springs” in Susanna’s section (II) and replays it in part IV as “touched the bawdy strings.” Stevens relies on the reader hearing from phrase to phrase the various plays in his puns and associations and repetitions. This is part of the tremendous formal pleasure of the poem; every reading turns up more and more sound.