Eugene Nassar explores a more abstract reading (and a more contentious one), according to which the poem is about the poet's "imaginative faculty", and Susanna represents the poem and the creative process of writing it. Laurence Perrine objects that Nassar's reading does violence to the poem and the story it leans on, naively ignoring Stevens" own "violence" in yoking a character from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" named in the title with a biblical narrative alluded to in "The Merchant of Venice". The greatest "violence" that Stevens' poem does, though, is to Susanna's biblical reputation for righteousness.