Denise Levertov (1923–1997) is a test case for how we judge antiwar poetry. Her friend Robert Duncan strongly criticized “Life at War”—first collected in The Sorrow Dance (1967)—for its sensationalism, and he was not alone. There was something coarse and unnuanced, even propagandistic, about Levertov’s most characteristic antiwar poems. Her critics may of course have been right, though whether a nuanced account of the napalming of human flesh in Vietnam can do justice to the thing it’s representing is a tricky question.
Levertov was the descendant of both the Hasidic master Shneur Zalman of Liadi and the Welsh mystic Angel Jones of Mold. She was educated at home in Essex, sent poems to T. S. Eliot when she was twelve (he responded encouragingly), worked as a nurse in London during the Blitz, married the American writer Mitchell Goodman in 1947, moved with him to New York the following year, became an American citizen in 1955, was encouraged and supported by the poets Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Creeley, and was clearly moving in a promising direction as a poet of the Black Mountain school. But then the Vietnam War came along, and she became a poet of a different sort in response to it, politically engaged as a writer and as an activist, visiting Hanoi in 1972. She continued writing after the war ended, returning to the religious themes important in her earlier work but not to that work’s formalism.
“Making Peace” is a later poem, first collected in Breathing the Water (1987), one of the few attempts made by antiwar writers to turn away from opposition and imagine in positive terms the goals that antiwar activists would seek if they won; it resulted from a question asked of her by the psychologist Virginia Shatir after a reading at Stanford.
The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough
weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, “My heart . . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though
its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.”
The same war
continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:
the knowledge that humankind,
delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,
whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,
still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.
We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness; we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—
who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.
Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;
our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
A voice from the dark called out,
“The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.”
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,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.