Susanna part 2

Music is feeling. I think i may have said this before but music conveys this whole realm of human expression that cannot be conveyed descriptively through language. Music touches us deeply. We sing when we are sad, and emotions pour from the depth of our souls. We sing when we are happy and our hearts are lifted up. I, too, believe there is a silent music of the earth, of our existence. There is a music in the silence that we can feel if only we pay attention. Emotions are music and music is emotion. Dance to the vibration of the earth and you will learn to listen to your heart, for our hearts speak, not in words, but in music. Our hearts beat out a steady rhythm. So we each exist to our own music--the music of the physical body. Susanna is pure. She is in tune with her own music and rhythm as she feels the sensual touch of water, of leaves on her hands. She is connected with the earth and a part of it. And the elders are somehow separated from the earth. They deny the music of their bodies until it can no longer be suppressed and comes surging and beating out.

Wallace Stevens evokes in my head this image of this woman who is so pure of heart, she listens to her heart and to the sounds of the world and she is connected with nature and herself. She is experiencing the bliss of the moment. Then, suddenly:

A breath upon her hand

Muted the night.

She turned —

A cymbal crashed,

Amid roaring horns.

Her whole world crashes in on her and everything begins to move very quickly--the poem moves from beautiful, sweet to crashing, loud, chaos (almost) like one of Beethoven's symphonies.

Though her physical beauty may fade, the fact that she was beautiful remains--it is in the past, it is preserved. Though the event of Susanna and the elders is over, it yet lives because it happened and it happens. It is a story of human experience. People are mortal, but this universal experience and this universal music is immortal. As long as humans live there will be beauty, there will be deceit and lies and truth and honesty and purity and goodness and evil and peace and war and desire. The essence of the story is immortal. This is what I take from the end of the poem.