Carapace (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
In “Carapace,” Levertov writes about her response to the world's political tragedies. A carapace is the hard shell of an animal, such as a turtle or crab, that protects the soft inner part from harm. The poem's persona announces that she herself is growing a shell, even though she regrets the shell-like exteriors of other people that render them insensitive to the world's problems. In the poem, she contemplates children. She begins as though the poet and a child were talking about a situation. The child has seen her own father shot by police; the poet asks the child if she knows...
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