Peter Quince at the Clavier

Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scrapings.

It is a "musical" allusion to the apocryphal story of Susanna, a beautiful young wife, bathing, spied upon and desired by the elders.

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.

[3] (Honorable mention might go to "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges".)

Kessler notes that "Unlike Plato or Kant, Stevens strives to unite idea and image.

"[4] Robert Buttel observes that each of the four sections has its "appropriate rhythms and tonalities", reading the poem as "part of the general movement to bring music and poetry closer together".

She instances the line "Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna" as mimicking the plucking of strings as well as suggesting the sexual itch.

Laurence Perrine objects that Nassar's reading does violence to the poem and the story it leans on, naively ignoring Stevens" own "violence" in yoking a character from A Midsummer Night's Dream named in the title with a biblical narrative alluded to in The Merchant of Venice.