Poetry and the Bible

For this blog, I read Susanna and compared it to the poem. Obviously, the first two stanza's of Wallace Stevens' poem are just a retelling of the original story. The last stanza is the really important one. He seems like he's almost blaming Susanna for her beauty; "in the flesh it [beauty] is immortal," "Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings/ Of those white elders." I didn't see it that way at all. Poor Susanna was only trying to take a bath in her own back yard, and she had two old, perverted peeping toms. I guess this story landed a little close to home for me, because I had a stalker, a friend's father, when I was 15, so I know how she feels. Only mine was never punished for anything, and the elders were chopped in half....
The other thing we were supposed to do is find a connection between a modern poem and a Bible Story. The first thing that popped intomy head was T.S. Eliot, my favorite poet. I remembered that in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (the poem I used for my Poem Analysis paper my senior year of high school that ended up being 22 pages long....) he makes a brief mention of Lazarus. I looked for another Eliot poem; the most obviously Biblical being "The Journey of the Magi." On the surface, "Magi" retells the story of the three wise men who came to see Jesus. But there are plenty of other allusions dispersed throughout the poem. The first other allusion I came across was the mention of the white horse; there is a white horse in Revelation.

The second one is a bit less obvious. Eliot says that there is "a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel," an obvious representation of the lamb's blood the Hebrews smeared over their doors when God came and smote the firstborn children of Egypt. Just after this line comes a mention of "pieces of silver," an allusion to how Judas sold Jesus to the Jewish elders for 30 pieces of silver.

He mentions "empty wine skins." It's a stretch, but I think he's alluding to Jesus turning the water into wine.

The last stanza says that when the people die, they "returned [...] to these Kingdoms." I think this is an allusion to the Kingdom mentioned in Revelation.

You've got to love Eliot.