Upon reading Denise Levertov’s “Life at War,” I found myself at war with how I should feel. It was as though each stanza intentionally brought me to a different emotion, leaving me as the reader unsure of how Levertov wanted me to feel collectively.
This poem has many moments of joy and beauty. In the sixth stanza, there is a lightheartedness to her words – a softness. She uses words like “delicate,” “flesh,” and “caress” to describe “Man.” This section almost read like a love poem written to “Man,” leaving me with feelings of warmth. If I was “Man,” I would be blushing. As she continues into the seventh stanza, there is a feeling of creativity and joy. She references music, laughter, dogs, and designs. It comes across as very playful, continuing with a lighthearted tone. Along a similar line, her ninth stanza is prideful and celebratory. She describes humankind as “mirrored forms of a God we felt as good.” This section left me feeling as though humankind could do no wrong.
But these feelings of happiness are fleeting, sandwiched in between disturbing and unsettling stanzas. The fourth stanza provokes feelings of disgust. She uses bodily references with “mucous membrane” and describes the imagination (something that is traditionally associated with joy) as being “filmed over with the gray filth.” She also provokes extremely unsetting emotions with her eighth stanza. In this section, Levertov describes a multitude of gory images by writing: “the 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.” It is very gruesome and disturbing to read. Lastly, she leaves the reader with one last moment of discomfort with her reference to “burned human flesh / is smelling in Vietnam as I write” in her tenth stanza.
The flip-flopping of emotions is in doubt highly intentional. Having the joyous sections be scattered throughout an otherwise stomach-turning poem made her happier stanzas seem like breathes of fresh air. It was as though I did not know I was holding my breath until I got to her loving sixth stanza and finally breathed. The intense contrast between the feelings of the good and the bad also worked to deepen the bad feelings of disturbance. Levertov understands that her audience is most likely not a person who has smelt the burning flesh of humans or heard the cries of babies in a warzone. Therefore, it is easy for her reader to read about violence involving war and not feel as unsettled by it as they should. She places moments of happiness and normalcy within her poem to force her reader to understand how deeply upsetting and unnormal war is.
Furthermore, I believe her true message is that humankind is multifaceted and complex. Humankind is not all good nor is it all bad. It is both loving and hateful. It is deeply disturbed and labyrinthine. Levertov takes you through a whirlwind of emotions – both good and bad – to resemble this. There are even stanzas that left me feeling a multitude of feelings simultaneously. For example, the lines in which she writes, “lumps of raw dough / weighing down on a child’s stomach on baking day,” caused me to feel a sense of nostalgia and warmth but also uneasiness and discomfort.
Finally, I am left to wonder what her outlook on humankind is. Her last stanza leaves the reader with a high sense of tension and doubt. She describes a “husky phlegm” as though there is an uncomfortable feeling of infection in the back of our throats. She also begins two lines with the word “nothing” one right after another, providing the reader with a feeling of numbness and emptiness. Finally, she ends her poem with an imaginative allusion to what “living at peace” would be like. She does to force her disconnected reader to recognize the harshness of war. By presenting us with the possibility of leaving in true peace, she is placing her reader (who is most likely not someone living in an active warzone) in the position of someone who is not living peacefully. I as the reader felt this last line was very speculatory due to the verb tense of her last words, “would have.” She wonders what “living at peace would have.” Therefore, I am unsure of how to feel, just as I am unsure of what her view is on humanity.
All that being said, I do think it would be worth a debate in class to discuss where Levertov stands. Does she write this poem as a eulogy for the humankind that was once great but has since been lost? Does she write to remind us, humans, that we are kind beings and humanity has not been lost? Or does she just believe humankind is a complex, just like the feelings within her poem?
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