The poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier," by Wallace Stevens, is a modernist piece of poetic art. Divided into four parts, it tells the story of the deflowering of Susanna. Stevens uses music and gender relationships as his themes and reveals his own relationship inadequacies. The poem uses the story of Susanna and the Elders as a rhetorical situation for the speaker where Quince plays the piano (the clavier) because of the desire he feels for his beloved. In "Peter Quince" metaphors are being used to feel the music as an artistic expression. .
The speaker thinks about the connection between the body and musical instruments as he addresses the object of his desires: "Just as my fingers on these keys/Make music, so the selfsame sounds/On my spirit make a music, too" (lines 1-3). The speaker tells his beloved that what he feels is music. Music is set as a metaphor for what happens in the poem itself. Furthermore, the basic argument of the poem is that poetry is feeling itself. If "I feel desire, I will make music"(line 5), desiring an anonymous woman in a "blue silk" dress (line 7). Music and feeling are equated. This equation is accentuated throughout the poem as music is used to define the concepts of beauty, desire, mortality, and death.
This desire takes on musical representation. The reference to the elders' desire for Susanna is symbolic of the speaker's own desire for the one he lusts after as expressed in the throb of the "basses of their beings," in "witching chords" (lines 13-14). Music is reintroduced as instruments are used as a metaphor for the elders themselves, and the music of these instruments as their sexual desire for Susanna. Here, a combination of alliteration and onomatopoeia is used to emphasize the auditory imagery of these instruments, with "witching" both betraying the spooky, occult quality of the chords and onomatopoetically representing their sound.
