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"The art of the octopus": The maturation of Denise Levertov's political vision
Renascence, Fall 1997 by Dewey, Anne
. . . Us they fatten,
us they exchange for this [money];
and they breed us not that our life
may be whole, pig-life
thriving alongside dog-life, bird-life,
grass-life, all
the lives of earth-creatures,
but that we may be devoured. (38)
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By viewing other animals as the means to wealth, humans restrict animals' lives, denying them the capacity to enjoy their world that Levertov imagines in Sylvia. This self-centeredly utilitarian view limits not only pig life but also human life by preventing the empathetic extension through which imagination grows. It denies the physically and spiritually nourishing vitality of environment on which each individual's life depends. By viewing human culture through pig consciousness, Levertov offers a fresh, playful understanding of human culture as essentially animal and of animals as part of a common "life" deserving equal respect. Levertov's own poetry seeks through chameleonlike translation into other perspectives to foster such imaginative empathy as both ethical imperative and esthetic pleasure.
The ideal of mutual empathy appears to constitute Levertov's test of existing cultural institutions in her subsequent poetry. She praises those that foster mutual vitality and condemns those that deny it. Republished as one section of Candles in Babylon, Pig Dreams represents an ideal of selective local community through which to evaluate our larger and more complicated contemporary culture. Here empathetic reflection becomes dangerous, rendering poetic voice vulnerable to destructive institutions that deny imaginative life. Candles in Babylon begins from a position of exile and orphanhood which represents alienation from a hostile environment. The opening and title poem of Candles in Babylon presents the public world as antithetical to nourishing reflection.
Through the midnight streets of Babylon
between the steel towers of their arsenals,
between the torture castles with no windows,
we race by barefoot, holding tight
our candles, trying to shield
the shivering flames, crying
"Sleepers Awake!" (ix)
While fragile individual vision survives, armor and aggression thwart imaginative interaction, rendering the public world inhospitable and lonely. Those opposing the rigid institutions that form public space are powerless to create communion. The ideal of community persists only in an art increasingly remote from experience, in their "hoping / the rhyme's promise was true" (ix). By presenting the repressive forces as "sleepers," however, Levertov renders imprisonment a state of mind. Beginning from the individual imagination's exile from the public world, Candles in Babylon seeks handholds by which the imagination may establish its place in history.
Levertov's distancing of poetic vision from Romantic identification with nature may emerge in part' from the inappropriateness of innocent identification with nature in the face of contemporary history. "The Soothsayer" presents the poet as a weaver whose art establishes private rather than public identity. Unlike Homer's Penelope, who weaves the heroic public history of the Trojan War by day and unravels it by night, the soothsayer weaves "fictions, tapestries / from which she pulls / only a single thread each day, / pursuing the theme at night." Her private imagination creates a cocoon only partially undone by public day. While she allies herself with mortal nature, her "daughters" or poetic creations possess a vital but nonorganic beauty, the "[d]elicate bloom / of polished stone. Their hair / ripples and shines like water, and mine / is dry and crisp as moss in fall." Although art possesses a vitality like nature's, its relation to nature remains unclear. "My daughters / have yet to bear / their fruit, / they have not imagined / the weight of it" (CB 4). Early poems in Candles in Babylon present poetic vision as an illusory beauty nourishing to self but uprooted from the world, as theatricality and fairy tale imagined in the theater's red and gold pomp suspended in the "chill" of ennui (Sj and as the magical view afforded by seven-league boots, "fertile dreams, / acts of passage, hovering /journeys over the fathomless waters" (15). The poems thus reestablish the integrity of private imagination shaken in To Stay Alive but remain unsure of its role in the public world.
