I have read Denise Levertov's poetry and prose for 40 years. I've tried to understand her poetry and read numerous essays, assessments, reviews, biographies, all of which try to explain why she wrote what she wrote. Sometimes you can know too much about a writer. The well informed reader then tends to over-interpret, close down hermeneutic options. So we reduce the impact of the words themselves because instead of listening to her voice, we listen to the voices that tell us what she is saying.
But her best work defies the critics and the fans. Her poems about peace are wrenched from a heart broken by the world's self-inflicted sufferings in war after war. How do you write poems for peace, and against war? The double burden the peace poet carries is like a cross laid across her shoulders. The first burden is the weight of the poet's responsibility to language and integrity, just to write the poem. But she labours at this hard enough task, laden with the back breaking supplement of an imagination seeking to envision and say in words, what she desperately longs to happen in reality. As she writes she hopes, desperately, that her words might conceivably help that reality forward towards its consummation. A poet writing a poem about peace, in the face of war, performs an act of such reckless trust and unrealistic hope that it would be easy to give up, to give in, to let war win. Not so Levertov.
She knows that peace doesn't just happen. Peace-making is a discipline, a sacrifice, requiring a change in the grammar of our ethics and the syntax opf our behaviour. Her poem "Making Peace" is a call to see the world differently, to construe the world towards new hopefulness, to imagine and then to enact peace-making as the new language and commerce of human relationships.
Making Peace
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.
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