New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  Critics and general readers would often better understand poetry if they did not habitually assume in the poet a more didactic intent than is in fact the case. Even in poems whose content is social and political, whose tone is one of protest or denunciation, the poet has not had designs upon the reader in the manner often attributed to him or her; that spirit of strategy proper to rhetoricians and demagogues is remote from the spirit of poetry. (It has a rightful place in the work of dramatists because of their different relationship to audience.)

  The compositional sense which adjusts, refines, adds or eliminates is strategic, yes: but in relation to an intuited whole work, not to an audience. There must be faith in the capacity of people to receive (eventually, if not at once) works that are good. To coax and woo the public is an expression of disdain, and corrupts the work itself. And the exploration of content and medium which activates the compositional sense, but is distinct from it, is a personal quest as uncertain and as open to shocks and epiphanies for the poet as for the defenseless, trusting, courageous reader.

  The need for “songs—thoughts sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces”—for the poetry lacking which “men die miserably every day,” metaphorically or literally, often because their lives have not even recognized that need, much less satisfied it—is felt by poets themselves, and they seek to satisfy it as readers, just like anyone else. But if they are to make poems sufficient to others’ needs, they must seek for survival and revelation in their own poems too—in the voyage of exploration and discovery that writing is. For an authentic poetry (or any other art) the one who demands must become the one who supplies. Poets must seek in their own poems the news found nowhere else, or die for the want of it. Those who are moved to create political poetry are as much in need of it as anyone else, and only an intuitive recognition of that fact (in addition to being gifted with the poet’s special relationship to language, the sine qua non of any achievement in the art) will enable them to make poems that give to others what they seek themselves.

  Perhaps that assertion itself implies a philosophy, which is to say, a political belief (for every philosophy is also a politics). The philosophy implied here is founded in a sense of the interdependence of all things, a sense of belonging to, rather than dominating, an ecosystem; and of the osmosis, the reciprocal nature, of the sustaining relationship between the parts of an ecosystem.

  One of the political things poetry, whether or not overtly political in its content, can do is to reveal that unity, that trembling web of being.

  * That is, to speak of sorrow in the light of imigination: from “To Speak,“ The Sorrow Dance, New Directions, 1966.

  Variants of this piece were orally presented on two or three different occasions.

  Poetry and Peace: Some Broader Dimensions

  (1989)

  IS THERE A POETRY of peace? A few years ago I participated in a panel at Stanford, on the theme of Women, War and Peace. During the question period, someone in the audience, whom I could not see—we speakers were on a stage, and the house lights were down—but whom I afterwards learned was the distinguished psychologist Virginia Satir, said that poets should present to the world images of peace, not only of war; everyone needed to be able to imagine peace if we were going to achieve it. Since I was the only poet on the panel, this challenge was mine to respond to—but I had only a lame and confused response to make. Afterwards I thought about it, and I remember discussing the problem—the problem of the lack of peace poems—with some poet friends, Robert Hass and David Shaddock, a few days later. What was said I’ve forgotten, but out of that talk and my own pondering a poem emerged which was in fact my delayed response. In it, I wrote,

  … But peace, like a poem,

  is not there ahead of itself,

  can’t be imagined before it is made,

  can’t be known except

  in the words of its making,

  grammar of justice,

  syntax of mutual aid.

  A feeling towards it,

  dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

  until we begin to utter its metaphors,

  learning them as we speak.

  A line of peace might appear

  if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

  revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

  questioned our needs, allowed

  long pauses …

  A cadence of peace might balance its weight

  on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

  an energy field more intense than war,

  might pulse then,

  stanza by stanza into the world, …*

  This analogy still holds good for me. Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind’s screen. Of course, one could seek out Utopian projections, attempts to evoke the Golden Age; but these are not the psychologically dynamic images Ms. Satir was hoping for, and I can think of none from our own century, even of the nostalgic or fantastic variety, unless one were to cite works of prose in the science fiction category. (And these, particularly if one compares them with the great novels of life as it is—with War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, with Middlemarch or Madame Bovary or Remembrance of Things Past—are entertainments rather than illuminating visions, because they tend to be works of fancy rather than imagination, at least in so far as they deal with human emotions and behavior.) Credible, psychologically dynamic poetic images of peace exist only on the most personal level. None of us knows what a truly peaceful world society might feel like. Since peace is indivisible, one society, or one culture, or one country alone could not give its members a full experience of it, however much it evolved in its own justice and positive peace-making: the full experience of peace could only come in a world at peace. It’s like the old song,

  I want/to be happy,

  but I/can’t be happy

  unless/you are

  happy too!

  Meanwhile, as Catherine de Vinck (a Catholic writer all of whose work expresses her deep faith) says in her Book of Peace, “Right Now”:

  Right Now

  Right now, in this house we share

  —earth the name of it

  planet of no account

  in the vast ranges of the sky—

  children are dying

  lambs with cracked heads

  their blood dripping on the stones.

  Right now, messengers reach us

  handing out leaflets

  printed with a single word:

  death

  misspelled, no longer a dusky angel

  death in the shape of a vulture

  landing on broken bodies

  torn flesh.

  …

  How can we mix this knowledge

  with the bread we eat

  with the cup we drink?

  Is it enough to fill these words

  these hollow flutes of bones

  with aching songs?

  And terror is what we know most intimately—that terror and the ache of chronic anxiety Yarrow cleaves articulates in “One Day.”

  One Day

  When you were thirteen, thoughtful,

  you said, “When

  the bomb falls, I won’t run, I won’t

  try to get out of the city like

  everyone else, in the panic.”

  When I was a child,

  younger than you, I had to

  crouch on the floor

  at school, under my desk.

  How fast could I do it?

  The thin bones of my arms

  crossed my skull,

  for practice. My forehead

  went against my knees. I felt

  the blinding light of the

  windows behind me.

  I knew what the bombs did.

  “I’ll find a tree,” you said,

  “and the tree will protect me.”

  T
hen I turned away, because

  I was crying and because you are my child.

  What if you stood on the wrong side?

  What if the tree, like me, had

  only its ashes to give?

  What if you have to stand one day

  in blasted silence,

  screaming, and I can never,

  never reach you?

  Meanwhile, what we do have is poems of protest, of denouncement, of struggle, and sometimes of comradeship. Little glimpses of what peace means or might mean come through in such poems as Margaret Randall’s “The Gloves.”

  The Gloves

  Yes we did march around somewhere and yes it was cold,

  we shared our gloves because we had a pair between us

  and a New York city cop also shared his big gloves

  with me—strange,

  he was there to keep our order

  and he could do that

  and I could take that

  back then.

  We were marching for the Santa Maria, Rhoda,

  a Portuguese ship whose crew had mutinied.

  They demanded asylum in Goulart’s Brazil

  and we marched in support of that demand,

  in winter, in New York City,

  back and forth before the Portuguese Consulate,

  Rockefeller Center, 1961.

  I gauge the date by my first child

  —Gregory was born late in 1960—as I gauge

  so many dates by the first, the second, the third, the fourth,

  and I feel his body now, again, close to my breast,

  held against cold to our strong steps of dignity.

  That was my first public protest, Rhoda,

  strange you should retrieve it now

  in a letter out of this love of ours

  alive these many years.

  How many protests since that one, how many

  marches and rallies

  for greater causes, larger wars, deeper wounds

  cleansed or untouched by our rage.

  Today a cop would never unbuckle his gloves

  and press them around my blue-red hands.

  Today a baby held to breast

  would be a child of my child, a generation removed.

  The world is older and I in it

  am older,

  burning, slower, with the same passions.

  The passions are older and so I am also younger

  for knowing them more deeply and moving in them

  pregnant with fear and fighting.

  The gloves are still there, in the cold,

  passing from hand to hand.

  In that poem (focussed on a small intimate detail—gloves to keep hands warm—and raying out from it to the sharing of that minor comfort, and so to the passing from hand to hand, from generation to generation, of a concern and a resolve) peace as such is very far off-stage, a distant unnamed hope which cannot even be considered until issues of justice and freedom have been addressed and cleared. Yet a kind of peace is present in the poem, too, the peace of mutual aid, of love and communion.

  The very fine Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, who, though an Anglican priest, often seems more profoundly skeptical and pessimistic than many secular poets, offers in “The Kingdom” a remote and somewhat abstract view of the possibility and nature of peace and a basic prescription for getting there:

  It’s a long way off but inside it

  There are quite different things going on:

  Festivals at which the poor man

  Is king and the consumptive is

  Healed; mirrors in which the blind look

  At themselves and love looks at them

  Back; and industry is for mending the bent bones and the minds fractured

  By life. It’s a long way off, but to get

  There takes no time and admission

  Is free, if you will purge yourself

  Of desire, and present yourself with

  Your need only and the simple offering

  Of your faith, green as a leaf.

  But faith is not complacency; and is grossly distorted if it leads to passivity, to a belief that God will pull our chestnuts out of the fire or fix everything with celestial bandaids. Catherine de Vinck corrects any such mistake: we must act our faith, she says, at the end of the last poem in her Book of Peace, by practical communion with others, offering up and sharing our bodily nourishment, the light of our belief, the living-space we occupy. The time for making peace, for constructing or evolving it, the title of this poem makes us recognize, is now:

  A Time for Peace

  We can still make it

  gather the threads, the pieces

  each of different size and shade

  to match and sew into a pattern:

  Rose of Sharon

  wedding ring

  circles and crowns.

  We can still listen:

  children at play, their voices

  mingling in the present tense

  of a time that can be extended.

  Peace, we say

  looking through our pockets

  to find the golden word

  the coin to buy that ease

  that place sheltered

  from bullets and bombs.

  But what we seek lies elsewhere

  beyond the course of lethargic blood

  beyond the narrow dream

  of resting safe and warm.

  If we adjust our lenses

  we see far in the distance

  figures of marching people

  homeless, hungry, going nowhere.

  Why not call them

  to our mornings of milk and bread?

  The coming night will be darker

  than the heart of stones

  unless we strike the match

  light the guiding candle

  say yes, there is room after all

  at the inn.

  That prescription is for a beginning, a change of attitude, a change of heart; but while it is true that if millions of people acted on it it would revolutionize society, it is only a beginning.

  What about testimonies of peace on a personal level? Yes, I do believe that poems which record individual epiphanies, moments of tranquillity or bliss, tell us something about what peace might be like. Yet because there is not peace they have, always, an undertone of poignancy. We snatch our happiness from the teeth of violence, from the shadow of oppression. And on the whole we do not connect such poems with the idea of peace as a goal, but, reading them, experience a momentary relief from the tensions of life lived in a chronic state of emergency.

  Muriel Rukeyser, in a poem begun on the trip to Hanoi she and I and Jane Hart made together in 1972, shortly before Nixon’s Christmas “carpet-bombing” of the North, wrote of the paradoxical presence of peace we felt there in the midst of war:

  It Is There

  Yes, it is there, the city full of music.

  Flute music, sounds of children, voices of poets,

  The unknown bird in his long call. The bells of peace.

  Essential peace, it sounds across the water

  In the long parks where the lovers are walking,

  Along the lake with its island and pagoda,

  And a boy learning to fish. His father threads the line.

  Essential peace, it sounds and it stills. Cockcrow.

  It is there, the human place.

  On what does it depend, this music, the children’s games?

  A long tradition of rest? Mediation? What peace is so profound

  That it can reach all habitants, all children,

  The eyes at worship, the shattered in hospitals?

  All voyagers?

  Meditation, yes; but within a tension

  Of long resistance to all invasion, all seduction of hate.

  Generations of holding to resistance; and within this resistance

  Fluid change that can respond, that can show the children

  A long future of finding
, of responsibility; change within

  Change and tension of sharing consciousness

  Village to city, city to village, person to person entire

  With unchanging cockcrow and unchanging endurance

  Under the

  skies of war.

  On that journey I had felt the same thing—the still center, the eye of the storm: “Peace within the/long war” I called it, in a poem called “In Peace Province.”

  Yes, though I have said we cannot write about peace because we’ve never experienced it, we do have these glimpses of it, and we have them most intensely when they are brought into relief by the chaos and violence surrounding them. The longing for peace, however, is a longing to get beyond not only the momentariness of such glimpses but also the ominous dualism that too often seems our only way of obtaining these moments. Experienced only through the power of contrast, a peace in any larger sense would be as false as any other artificial Paradise, or as the hectic flush of prosperity periodically induced in ailing economies by injections of war and arms-industry jobs and profits.