"The art of the octopus": The maturation of Denise Levertov's political vision

LEVERTOV seems to graft Pavese's conception of local culture as a collective experience of place onto her view of the individual as active creator of culture. In so doing she develops an ideal of culture as the shared meaning with which individuals invest their environment through careful use and communication. The poem sequence concluding Life in the Forest, "Metamorphic Journal," presents the origin of the imagination and its social extension into culture as the product of empathetic reflection between individuals. In contrast to the political journal "Staying Alive," "Metamorphic Journal" imagines a private love relationship. Seeking to articulate the origin of her love, the speaker compares her feeling for her lover to her childhood delight in embracing different elements of her natural environment, trees to feel their solidity and a river so that her "mind would sink like a stone / and shine underwater, / dry dull brown / turned to an amber glow" in order "to know / the river's riveriness with my self" (LF 126-27). Imagined identification with other beings helps her to understand herself. Continuing this refraction of self through environment, the speaker goes on to interpret love alternately as the desire for something stable (treelike) to cling to, for a river's flow toward dissolution in the sea, and for a flickering flame akin to watery fluidity. The poem weaves the four elements--earth, water, fire, air--into a cosmos which symbolizes selves defined through love. The search for correlatives for desire and the self formed through it sparks imaginative growth:

Love and "Imagination" thus remain in reciprocal relation, love awakening the imagination through which the self creates its own meaning. Ideally, such empathy fosters the growth of both individuals, for the cosmos each creates enriches and confirms the other's experience as expressed through symbolic understanding of their shared environment.

Pig Dreams, a poem cycle portraying a pet pig Sylvia's life on a Vermont farm, extends "Metamorphic Journal"'s conception of individual and collective imagination as formed in mutual reflection into an ideal society. A whimsical version of Wordsworth's Prelude as it might have been written by a pig, Pig Dreams traces the spiritual development of the pet pig Sylvia from birth to religious enlightenment and a vision of paradise. Like the speaker of "Metamorphic Journal," Sylvia comes to understand herself through her relation to others. Levertov's playful poetic forms express the varied perspectives into which she enters through her friends. Taken from her pig mother to become a house pet, Sylvia learns gregariousness from her "dogbrothers," contemplation from the solitary cat, mortality from the seasons. The slow, stepwise form of "Her Sister" embodies the ruminant contemplation the cow communicates to her:

Thinking her way into Kaya's mind, Sylvia discovers its peace to be a reflection of harmony between earth and sky. This harmony is imagined in terms of the local environment, the pasture, which the animals share. Beginning from an articulation of difference which lured empathetic identification, Sylvia discovers a deeper kinship with Kaya in their worship of the same goddess (Isis), in the human love domesticated animals enjoy, and in appreciation of nature (35). While Kaya arrives at these beliefs and feelings through rumination, Sylvia's discovery is "porcine." Imagining touch as the primary sense through which a pig might perceive and enjoy its world, Levertov presents the "pigpatterns" Sylvia makes trotting in the mud after the rain as shining and reflecting the sky with the same light as Kaya's eyes. The many compound words Levertov coins in Pig Dreams ("cowfriend," "pigpatterns," "dogbrothers," "She-human," "pigwisdom," to name a few) represent this hybrid quality of the imagination formed through contact with others. Despite different modes of perception, the animals' pleasure in their environment converges in their common perception of harmony among its elements. Sylvia's imaginative agility enables her to understand each animal's unique appreciation of this shared environment and thus deepens her understanding of the interplay of similarity and difference among the farm animals that creates such harmony in diversity.