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"The art of the octopus": The maturation of Denise Levertov's political vision
Renascence, Fall 1997 by Dewey, Anne
Such metaphysical unity affects history insofar as it remains part of the collective imagination, for names for the gods are "all that Imagination / has wrought, . . . naming, forming-to give / to the Vast Loneliness / a hearth, a locus" (111). Faith in a common conception of deity is thus essential to overcoming the isolation and alienation that characterize the "Age of Terror." The "Agnus Dei" defines divinity as an ideal common essence in the relation between natural and human being and Biblical word. By deriving the essence of the "Lamb of God" from the concrete attributes of earthly lambs, Levertov unites spiritual language with the concrete referents in a mutual enfolding of deity and physical nature. Representing the lamb as "afraid and foolish," "vigorous / to nuzzle at milky dugs" (113), the poem affirms divinity as a vulnerable innocence that must be protected. "God then, / encompassing all things, is / defenseless?" (114). "[B]orn in bloody snowdrifts, licked by forbearing / dogs more intelligent than its entire flock" (114), the lamb is part of nature, protected less by divine power than by the collaboration of an extended family of other animals. Recognition that all beings are as vulnerable as oneself renders the self a nurturing mother as well as an orphan seeking a home. Isolated individuals thus merge into a collective voice. "[W]e / must protect this perversely weak / animal, whose muzzle's nudgings / suppose there is milk to be found in us? / Must hold to our icy hearts / a shivering God?" (114). While both human and lamb are cold, each seeks nourishment in the other. The concluding "Let's try" (115) dissolves the ideological and technological structures which compartmentalize contemporary experience to begin to create a public space inhabited by individuals whose fragile beauty demands a responsibility of mutual protection. The "Mass" thus recovers the firm purpose for the imagination, shaken and uprooted at the beginning of Candles in Babylon. The imagination becomes the agent of compassion through which the isolated "shivering" candles may form a nurturing community, Levertov's Christian conception of deity providing a metaphysical basis for the common essence discovered in empathetic reflection.
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Local community established through empathetic reflection has remained central to Levertov's political writing since Candles in Babylon. Subsequent works explore the possibilities and tensions that arise from this stance. In the major political poems of her next two volumes (Breathing the Water and A Door in the Hive), "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416" and "El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation," Julian's childhood home and precolonial Mayan culture are models of a vital interaction between individual and environment in which daily work is worship of one's materials, deity a nurturing parent. Levertov's meditations on nature in Evening Train and Sands of the Well, written as she made a new home in the Pacific Northwest, reveal the beauty and wisdom gained from imaginative communion with neighboring mountain, heron, forest, and sea. Protest poems expose the technological and linguistic structures by which we destroy such communion. "Those Who Want Out," for example, depicts the thoroughly artificial environment and language of researchers who devote their lives to leaving the earth to found a colony in outer space (DH 44). "News Report, September 1991" is a collage of the military rhetoric used to desensitize soldiers to brutal killing during the Gulf War (ET 81-83). The difficulty of Levertov's poetics of empathetic reflection lies in representing how a powerful vision of harmony becomes a force for political change, and some of her poems explore this problem. "Where is the Angel?" expresses frustration at the peaceful beauty of a "mild September" through which "History / mouths, the volume turned off" (DH 53). Evening Train's section "Witnessing from Afar" provides one solution to this problem by tracing the small yet significant effects at home of apparently remote violence to reveal the vital interconnection of all life on earth. Levertov's most frequent strategy seems, however, to be to reveal the discrepancy between harmony and violence through juxtaposition of the two in poems whose tone ranges from pathos to irony, outrage, and occasional bitterness.
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