Hearing Hushed Emotions: A Subtle Symphony of Diction in “Peter Quince at the Clavier”

Hearing Hushed Emotions: A Subtle Symphony of Diction in “Peter Quince at the Clavier”

“Music is feeling, then, not sound,” writes Wallace Stevens in his poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” beginning to establish music as the connection between physical and spiritual. Music-related terminology fills the poem, which Stevens composes like a piece of music, with four movements and varying rhythms that echo one another. The rhythms and terminology Stevens employs dually reflect the subjects he writes about, a dynamic that embodies the link between music and emotion in the poem. The language of music develops silent emotions; when hearts quietly jump or stomachs secretly turn, “a cymbal crashe[s], / and roaring horns.” In this overly-theatrical development of clandestine, unperformed emotions, the poem fashions its unique mixture of mocking and irony with regards to its subjects. In the poem, therefore, music acts as a link between the outwardly physical and the furtively emotional; similarly, the musical diction of the poem works as a channel between the subjects, their muted sentiments, and the acoustically ironic message the poem conveys about those subjects and their feelings.

In the third stanza of the poem, the speaker comments that “thinking . . . is music,” which reminds him of the “strain waked” in the elderly men who eagerly watch young Susanna bathe in her garden in The Book of Susanna in the Apocrypha. Stevens’s use of “strain,” which means “physical exertion,” a “prevailing quality or characteristic,” and a “passage of musical expression,” initiates the plotting of musically-connotative words in the poem. The trio of connotations forges the link between the emotions of the subjects and the sound ...

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...eption of her behavior. In offering a musical voice to Susanna’s hushed emotions, the poem taps out the subtle rhythm of human iniquity that pulses not simply in the ultimate culprits, as in a more traditional, good-guys-versus-bad-guys telling of the story, but also in the ones who receive the “constant sacrament of praise.” The musical language in the poem thus acts as an equalizer: though each person contributes a different instrumental sound, all people contribute equally to the broader composition, comprised of notes which in many ways sound more similar than cursory listening may suggest.

Works Cited

Dictionary.com. Lexico Publishing Group. 16 April 2004. .

Stevens, Wallace. “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” An Introduction to Poetry. Eds. Dana Gioia and X.J. Kennedy. 10th ed. San Francisco: Longman, 2002. 526.