Denise Levertov American Literature Analysis
In her collection of essays The Poet in the World (1973), Levertov explains the close connection between the poetic and the political: “A sense of history must involve a sense of the present, a vivid awareness of change, a response to crisis, a realization that what was appropriate in this or that situation in the past is inadequate to the demands of the present, that we are living our whole lives in a state of emergency which is unparalleled in all history.” It is her contention that, as a poet, she cannot stand aside and ignore these events happening around her, but rather she must address these threats to humanity. Poetry is the appropriate medium to do this because the poet can personalize these concerns.
In the same book, Levertov discusses her craft and its process. For her, to write poetry is not simply to manipulate words. Perhaps conflating both Pound and the nineteenth century Transcendentalists, Levertov contends that creating poetry requires the writer to transform personal experience into words by intuiting an order into the experience. To those ends, not to mention or note her further conflation of meditation, spirituality, nature, and (eventually) Judeo-Christianity would be to miss a large element of her later career. How exactly Levertov constructs or understands religion and spirituality is difficult to discern and often seems to modulate with the passage of time. It is fair to say, however, that in her poetry the words result from intense perception and immersion into the experience itself, in a sort of deep trance.
This meditative state brings about her words and invigorates them with life through the spoken word. This action of saying something leads to further deep perception, and the cycle of poetry reiterated becomes almost unending. As complex as that epistemology sounds, aside from her first volume of poetry, Levertov’s poems use concrete, everyday language in a free verse form that is organic, growing from within the experience that gave rise to the words. The idea is that, while the thoughts behind the words are complex and manifold, the words themselves are easily accessible.
Levertov uses her political experiences as sources for many of her poems. She shies away from very little in the political arena, having written on topics such as pollution, the destruction of the rain forests, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, animal rights, and many others. In all these poems, Levertov juxtaposes images of life and nature with images of death so that the reader will personalize these events and, as she did, make the political become personal.
Because Levertov is so intensely immersed in these events, she can turn them into poetry successfully. In each poem, language and vision are equally dependent upon each other. Each experience has a form that the poet intuits, an order that perhaps she alone can see. In “Some Notes on Organic Form” (1965), she writes of a poetic process in which a cross-section of several experiences comes together in a moment. The poet is the person who can capture the experiences in words. The form that the resulting poem takes is self-reflexive and becomes determined by the experience.
For example, in “Carapace,” from Oblique Prayers (1984), she writes of the desire to retreat into a shell that will protect her from the horrors of people’s inhumanity. The poem’s stanzas are arranged so that longer lines enclose shorter ones, creating a visual carapace, or shell, in the text itself. In “Snail,” from Relearning the Alphabet , the form the poem takes imitates a snail’s slow movement. In “A Marigold from North Vietnam,” from the...
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same book, the lines are disjointed, with large spaces between the images. The form imitates what was done not only to the country of Vietnam but also to the American spirit by the war. Levertov writes in free verse, but the form is internal—there is definitely a form, but it is liberated from conventional verse forms.
“The Stricken Children”
First published: 1987 (collected in Breathing the Water, 1987)
Type of work: Poem
Returning to the scene of her happy childhood, the poet contemplates children who have lost their childhoods.
In “The Stricken Children,” the persona governing the poem—many attribute it as Levertov herself—recalls her return to a wishing well of her childhood. During that time, the well was a clear bubbling spring less than three feet across, with a bank of rocks protecting it from falling leaves. It was a tiny personal place which the speaking persona recalls as likely holding within it the wishes of many others from the past. People who came here did not throw money but, rather, searched themselves for the right small wish to throw into the well in the form of a pebble or rock. The immediate juxtaposition here is that visitors did not throw money, as wishes are not meant to be bought but rather hoped for with deepest interest and concern. This well was the place where, year after year, she returned to launch her journeys into the imagination. Like the spring, her childhood imagination could roam uncluttered, and the experiences she encountered nourished her.
When she returns as an adult, however, the wishing well has changed. She had hoped it would be familiar, merely older. Instead, it was marred, unfamiliar and sickly. The naïve beauty and appreciation she had for it in the past has been tarnished by a modern society who had filled it with its consumer excess, which she views, quite literally, as pollution. She wonders if the spring, so clogged, still flows, and if it was children who deposited the trash. If so, she muses, how damaged are these children by such consumerism? From the persona’s perspective, could children who would exact such violence on Nature actually dream; would they understand real desire? Were they raised by people who could instill virtue and imagination within them?
She leaves quickly, for the urgency of her own dreams pushes her onward. She continues to wonder, however, about the children of today, these stricken children who cannot find a source of nourishment for their dreams anywhere in a disposable culture of throwaways. The past, the generative wellspring that gave her the stability to dream and to act on dreams, has been, like the well, choked up. From the persona’s perspective, modern culture has strangled the imagination of these children at exactly the time of life when they most need to develop it.
It is possible that the personal awareness of what her own childhood offered in nourishing her life leads Levertov to reexamine the concept of childhood itself, here in the light of the cultural and political climate that could produce stricken children. In the poem’s view, the world is violent, and this violence enters every life soon after birth. The child does not have time to develop an imagination or a sense of wonder. Levertov’s poem re-creates that wonder at the same time that it warns against the political and social consequences of careless actions.
“Cademon”
First published: 1987 (collected in Breathing the Water, 1987)
Type of work: Poem
Utilizing the British tale of the first Christian poet, Levertov asserts a method for finding a poetic voice.
Denise Levertov’s own footnote for this poem tells the reader that the plot of “Cademon” comes from the History of the English Church and People (731), by Saint Bede the Venerable, the first known British Christian poet. That information tells readers that the historical analog of “Cademon” is the story of an illiterate stable hand who received a divine call to sing in praise of God.
Even armed with that knowledge, readers may find that the tight line and verse structure of “Cademon” obviates simple readings of the poem. It is reminiscent, perhaps, of the laconic verse of Levertov’s Imagist mentors: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H. D. The message appears to be simple enough: Any beings who come into contact with the spirit can be transformed into something magnificent. Here, the clumsy, inarticulate persona informs the reader of his inability with words by comparing the situation to being trapped in a dance without any knowledge of steps or grace. Yet when he is touched by the divine hand of an angel while attending to his duties as a cowhand, he finds his mouth and lips touched, burned even, by the fiery hand of God, and he discovers his poetic voice.
Whether the poem is meant to be didactic, with Levertov asserting the ways of finding one’s own poetic voice utilizing the tale of Cademon as an example, or whether it is an autobiographical analog to both her own poetic ascension and her Christian conversion, is debatable. There is little biographical evidence to assert the latter reading, but given the persona’s self-effacing attitude toward himself, there is some credibility to consider the discussion. Regardless of how one interprets the intention of the piece, “Cademon” illustrates Levertov’s transformative reliance upon her reconceptualization of the divine as a source material separating herself from her more Transcendental roots to ones assuredly more Christian.
“Carapace”
First published: 1984 (collected in Oblique Prayers, 1984)
Type of work: Poem
Levertov asserts that a person needs a protective shell to avoid the tragedies of life but, at the same time, needs to reach out for the experiences that life offers.
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 what the word “subversive” means. The child’s somewhat attentive somewhat sardonic reply indicates that despite her youth, this child is already an adult, a product of modern inhumanity.
The poet then goes back to contemplating how well her shell is growing and how superior it is to mere skin. Speaking as though she could control the growing of a body part, she remarks that there will be chinks in the armor where the sections in the carapace do not completely meet. Whether or not the insinuation here demands that these are welcome points of entry where someone could still reach the soft underbelly is debatable, as one could read that act as one of violation or one of nurture. Yet, the poem’s ending is telling, depending upon how one invokes the tone.
Another child enters, this boy only nine years old. When asked how he feels about his missing father, who has “disappeared,” he replies with a shrug and says only that he is sad. The repeated violence that the boy has seen in his short life has rendered him unemotional about even his own father.
The poem ends with an urging to the shell to grow faster. At the same time, the world’s problems still intrude. Levertov seems to write of two minds here: She wants to hide from the evil that destroys the wonder of the world; at the same time, she realizes that it is impossible to so do. If the shell encased her like a suit of armor, then she would entirely lose the sensitivity to life and the will to try to change things.
The probable political message here is one of a poet responding not only to the explicit situations of missing persons in Central America but also to all inhumanity. The concrete situations and the dialogue, written in everyday language, paint clear images. A man is shot as he is escaping over a wall, and a young person responds to deep grief with only a shrug. The visual structure of the text itself resembles the subject, a shell. The two scenes with the children are inset, while the comments on the growth of the shell surround them, in the same way that the growing shell covers the vulnerable animal inside. The form and the subject mesh, as the poet arranges these scenes to force the reader to contemplate such inhumanity.
“Death in Mexico”
First published: 1978 (collected in Life in the Forest, 1978)
Type of work: Poem
A parable of a Mexican gardener, the poem finds Levertov contemplating the responsibilities and complexities of harvesting the power of nature.
Somewhat autobiographically connected to Levertov’s mother, “Death in Mexico” tells the story of the old woman’s attempts to cultivate a British-styled garden in a considerably more arid climate. The narrative’s central plot is simple enough: Levertov muses upon the deterioration of her mother’s well-kept garden over the course of three weeks when the old woman is taken from her home as the result of what will eventually be a fatal illness. The poem’s persona indicates that she did attempt to keep the garden up for the old woman, and encouraged others to as well, but, in lieu of the gardener’s personal care, the garden deteriorates and quickly becomes overwhelmed.
Behind the poem’s narrative lie further examples of Levertov’s Transcendental roots. Death and deterioration are inextricably tied together in the ultimate fate of the old woman and that of her garden. Likewise, death and the transition to it are met not with remorse or even anger but merely with an acceptance that it is a natural state in the cycle of life. The persona, like the gardener, offers up no sentimentality for the garden that took twenty years to assemble, but rather she spends the length and breadth of the poem musing and observing upon the garden as it decays.
What is questioned, though, is whether humanity has the right to attempt such cultivation in the first place. In many ways, Levertov constructs the old gardener as a stubborn and obdurate surrogate for God in her cultivation of a garden in a place where no earthly garden should be (drawing a parallel to God’s creation of a Garden of Eden in what is now an arid desert climate). The old woman’s gaze, shown by Levertov as she is taken away, is one of God’s determined fixity looking upon his creation in disrepair. The gaze fixes upon a single blossom and understands with acceptance that it was only meant to live, as such, for a single day. As the poem closes, the persona notes that the garden, likewise fixed in its place for twenty years, now too will pass away as part of the natural process.
“What Were They Like?”
First published: 1971 (collected in To Stay Alive)
Type of work: Poem
A commentary on what Levertov perceived to be the American policy toward Vietnam, this poem vilifies the idea of the loss of an entire culture because of war.
“What Were They Like?” illustrates Levertov’s political concerns; here, her interests lie in questioning, quite literally, the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The poem itself is little more than a list of six questions and answers. The questions come forth from a voice almost childlike in design and naïveté, while the answers solicited are dismissive and irritated in their tone and content.
The questions show concern for the loss of knowledge about the Vietnamese people, but they are by no means of an outwardly political or journalistic nature. Rather, the persona, which seems youthful but is not, asks questions germane to a deeper understanding of the culture of Vietnam: What were their religious mores? What made them laugh? Can the person answering the questions tell the persona anything of their literature? The persona seems aware that the idea of Vietnam might already be lost or be in the process of being expurgated rather than studied or illuminated.
The responses, while not terse, are stultifying and try to obviate the discussion. They are also sarcastic in tone, as the responsorial voice twists the wording of the questions to mock the person asking them. For example, when the questioner asks whether the Vietnamese used stone lanterns, the responsorial voice declares that the Vietnamese people held light hearts that had turned to stone. In this dismissal, the respondent echoes and amplifies the idea that, even if any of these questions had once been germane, most of this otherwise arcane knowledge has long since been forgotten.
American military policy is illuminated here as destructive and unconcerned with the collateral damage of the war brought about by its tactics. Frequently mentioned are allusions to fire, burning, bombing, and the charred remains of a people and their civilization. Given Levertov’s political stances, it is almost self-evident that the respondent’s voice is to be vilified as destructive and genocidal, as it is more concerned with reporting the decimation of the Vietnamese people than with knowing anything about them. The ultimate answer of the respondent is that it is impossible to know these people now, as they are largely silent and forgotten.
“A New Year’s Garland for My Students/MIT: 1969-1970”
First published: 1970 (collected in Footprints, 1972)
Type of work: Poem
Thirteen vignettes of students in a poetry seminar create precise portraits of young people developing into adults.
The thirteen sections of “A New Year’s Garland for My Students/MIT: 1969-1970” were inspired by the students in a poetry seminar during Levertov’s year as a visiting professor and poet-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Each section is dedicated to one student, and each varies in length and line arrangement. Levertov captures the essence of the students by observing telling details and making frequent comparisons with nature.
For example, in “Arthur,” Levertov sees a person at a stage in life when nothing seems to be happening. She compares him to the buds of trees and bushes that in winter go unnoticed. Yet the buds are there and are as complex and beautiful as are the “eventual silky leaves in spring.” Using the word “silky” indicates her positive attitude toward his development. Silk is a fabric highly valued as well as smooth to the touch; the comparison calls to mind the lowly silkworm that produces the luxurious strands.
In “Bill,” Levertov sees a questioner who can disturb the pleasant atmosphere by posing important but dark thoughts. She pictures a garden with a fence around it, but the fence has an open gate. Perhaps she is comparing this garden to the classroom, an enclosure that has an open atmosphere in its encouragement of creativity. The garden is pretty and stable, predictable. Yet in a dark corner lurk threatening eyes that interject an element of uncertainty into the otherwise pleasant surroundings. Like a sharp question that hits a sensitive topic in a discussion, this presence in the garden is disturbing yet necessary.
Levertov sees herself in another student, “Judy.” Because Judy is petite, Levertov imagines her to be as light and airy as Greek goddesses or characters in the plays of William Shakespeare. The real Judy, as she sets off bundled up on a winter’s evening, reminds the poet of herself at a young age, trudging to and from the library overloaded with books, as reading was nurtured in her home. As a child, the poet’s active imagination turned the commonplace objects on city streets into things of beauty; she imagines Judy to have this same inner quality.
In “Ted,” Levertov sees several different people, two clearly. Both are by the sea, but they perceive things differently. A young girl dances with joy and speaks brightly in the sunlight, but a ruminative and apparently despondent old man sees the sea as a horror of unseen terrors, and he is quiet. There are also other voices in Ted, but they must be quiet until the old man issues a decree, as he appears to want to. These other voices will wait until this stage in life is over before they rise to be heard.
In nature, a closer look reveals an intricacy unnoticed by the ordinary person and perhaps unrealized itself. In the case of her students, Levertov takes a close look beneath the surface to find their potential for imaginative development. As in her other poetry, Levertov uses experiences as springboards for description that reaches the essence of what is important in humanity. She obviously cares for these people and wants them to develop to their fullest.
“September 1961”
First published: 1964 (collected in O Taste and See, 1964)
Type of work: Poem
Lamenting the loss of her poetic mentors, Levertov devotes a poem to the inspiration that they provided her while announcing her own poetic intentions.
Bordering upon a threnody, or song of mourning, “September 1961” finds Levertov’s poetic persona crying out in lament for many of her high modernist mentors: Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and H. D. Indeed, when the poem was published in 1964, only Pound was still living, and, as noted in the poem, he was operating within his “quiet years,” having spent copious time in an Italian prison and American sanatorium.
The poem’s voice finds itself, presumably the voice of Levertov (though among others), alone on a road bereft of her poetic masters, anticipating their loss. Strangely though, this road leads to a sea, often the symbol of fecundity and generative power. In her pockets are words and themes, the building materials of her poetry, Williams’s “no ideas but in things,” but her advisers no longer light a candle for her to follow. They have withdrawn into private conditions, silent like Pound or hobbled by medical ailments like Williams.
Whether this loss is problematic or emancipating to the poem’s voice is debatable. Of particular note is the construction of the third-person collective “we” that the persona uses. Levertov creates a subject position that many may occupy—the inheritors of the high modernist tradition—but, assuredly, the high modernists whom she invokes are those poets who touched her life personally and specifically.
The persona is unsure how she will be affected by the loss of these great voices, but she continues along the path, realizing that she has some distance to go. However, the voice is somewhat assured that she is going in the right direction, as she can smell the sea air wafting upon a breeze approaching her. She invokes her own Transcendental predecessors and places her trust in nature. Armed with the tools given to her by her mentors, she is confident that she will find the generative sea, alone, eventually.
“The Jacob’s Ladder”
First published: 1961 (collected in The Jacob’s Ladder, 1961)
Type of work: Poem
Invoking a passage from Genesis, Levertov issues a possibly ambiguous manifesto on poetic construction.
Invoking the story of Jacob’s dream from Genesis 28:10-17, “The Jacob’s Ladder” utilizes the dream as metaphor for poetic construction. The plot from Genesis maintains that when Jacob came to rest his head at the end of the day, he dreamed that he saw God’s angels ascending and descending a great ladder reaching from Earth to the heavens. God announced to Jacob that all the land that he surveys should belong to him and his descendants, and his descendants should be so many that they would be as the dust is to the Earth. Jacob awakened and acknowledged that this place upon which he had slept was holy and touched by God.
Levertov picks up the story and utilizes it as a leitmotif (with subtle emendation) for her thoughts on a poetic construction that, she asserts, can approach the divine. In the poem, her narrator observes that the ladder is, in fact, a stairway (possibly referring to one of many actual geographical locations, such as the cut-in steps of Cheddar Gorge in the United Kingdom) of a cut, rosy stone meant as much, if not more, for human steps as for those of angels, who would not need to tread upon the tangible. However, the stairway itself is sharp, jagged, and a difficult climb that scrapes the knees of the climber who would dare ascend it and approach God in Heaven. Yet this pain, in some way, consoles the climber.
The last line suggests an interesting ambiguity in the poem, as it seems to imply that the ascendant of the stairs is not a mortal but rather the poem itself ascending into the heavens. This ambiguity is hardly minor, however, as the possible difference in meanings allows for a shift in the agency of the written word: Does poetry come from a person, or is it inspired by something incorporeal, living and breathing with its own life? That Levertov constructs the stairway not as a mystical, gleaming thing made of evanescent materials but rather as one made of rock lends to a particular reading, but even this thought becomes complicated as the staircase sits in front of a doubting, gray skyline. The tenor of the piece suggests that the biblical Jacob’s remarks are indeed true, but whether poetry is the stuff of the divine or the corporeal is left for the reader to ponder.
