Peter & Susanna

Susanna has a sultry stature in the Daniel's time. So her subordinates feel they must dispose of her beauty. They are so because they have the same love for one woman, yet they know they cannot have equal lust, attraction, or possibly love for one woman less than preferred. This storytelling preference for one woman allows these garden elders to conspire a Law-and-Order type plan to fool the judicial board. Susanna is sentenced, and although her body is gone her beauty lives on.

Susanna's most valued attribute was the cause of her downfall. It's almost like the elders didn't want her lust-prone beauty to infect any others. Maybe she was one of those drop-dead gorgeous. Lust, I mean, love at first site. One of those girls that cause epidemics amongst local socialism.

Avast, Wallace Stevens' retort is a cry to Hosanna. The story of the destruction of Susanna and her beauty hurts his heart. His poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier" recounts, more or less, the main events of the apocryphal legend. Stevens' added poetic emotion is a parallelism of, potentially, how we're supposed to feel for Susanna. Stevens' semantics, stuttering style, and mythological approach show his affection for Susanna. Through this poem, I believe Wallace Stevens is retorting his feelings of ecstasy towards Susanna's conundrum and fate. Yet, if Susanna's beauty lives on then it might cause some lustful tendencies. Lust is a behind-the-scenes thing, and this is this can be correlated, if not the causation, of the valid biblical judicial system. Thus, the so-called justifiers are making the wrong calls which is why we remember Susanna. And her beauty.