If an allusion falls in the woods, and no one is around, does the Bible hear it?

This is the story of an allusion. It begins in the Apocrypha, in a book entitled Susanna. It climaxes as Peter Quince plays the Clavier, and returns, as dust to dust and ashes to ashes, with the book of Susanna.

So...what does it all mean? The story of Susanna, in the Bible, is really more of a story of Daniel, her saviour. Nonetheless, it tells the tale of a woman who is coveted by evil old men, that wish to lie with her. She denies them, and they lie with her anyways. They do this by telling a story of her consorting with a young man, thus ruining her and condemning her to death.

The poem by Wallace Stevens is a beautiful extended metaphor likening, perhaps, life to music and beauty to Frye's eternal myth. Stevens opens the poem strongly,

Music is feeling, then, not sound.
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Leaving no doubt that, if nothing else, someone is feeling a desire so strong, it can almost be heard. Enter Susanna:

It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

And now Stevens uses the metaphor as bodies as instruments to portray music in about as perverted and deeply unnappealing way as I have ever seen:

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

The poem continues, bewitching the senses, describing the world by sound, by soundtrack, by music by instrument, until we can hear, not read, the book of Susanna. But why? Why illustrate a story with sound?

Beauty is momentary in the mind As a sound, no matter how it echoes, finally fades

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

Here we get into the meat of the matter. I believe that on some level this poem corresponds to Frye's idea of the importance of a metaphor. The archetype, the beauty, of the desire a woman inspires in a man, of their lecherous plotting, of her retaliation, lives on, even though her story, her music, may fade. The body of her tale lies in the instrument, in the repeating patterns and rythms we are capable, nay, prone, to repeating.

In my reading, this poem fits so nicely into Frye's metaphor I am struck by the beauty and congruency. The bible is an endless source of metaphors of human behaviour, of repeating action and reaction, of eternal tendencies. Though the reality, the truth, the MIND of this may fade, the archetype is always present. The music can always be replayed, the tune must always be re-sounded.

Yet, as we like to repeat, one can only misread something. I am eager to see what else this poem means to people, what they take from it, as my experience is only so small, so dependent.