In the Land of Shinar

Denise Levertov 1992

“In the Land of Shinar” was published in 1992 in Evening Train, Denise Levertov’s seventeenth volume of poetry. As many of her poems do, it contains an allusion to an ancient text, time, or place, even while it looks into the heart of the present and sees implications for the future. The “land of Shinar” is a reference to the place where the Tower of Babel was built, according to the Bible’s Old Testament book of Genesis. According to the story, the tower was constructed out of human ambition and the desire to “make a name for ourselves”; it thus provides a stark contrast to the Ark, which Noah built with divine specifications and blessing. In the world before Babel, says Genesis, “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” but God scattered the people and “confused their words,” splintering language into incomprehensible tongues before their arrogant project could be completed.

Levertov’s poem brings the Tower of Babel story into the twentieth century with new meaning. In the irregular, unrhymed, exploratory lines of “In the Land of Shinar,” the vivid details of labor, construction, and architecture — “mounting tier by lessening tier” — provide an image that can be superimposed on modern realities as concrete as a nuclear power facility or as abstract, though no less urgent, as the mounting, spiraling growth of technology, industrialism, and consumerism. Many of Levertov’s “prophetic” or political poems name specific times and places: Vietnam in 1966, Detroit in 1967, Berkeley in 1968, and California during the Gulf War. Others, such as “In the Land of Shinar,” leave local particulars unnamed, allowing the reader to make his or her own analogies to time and place, thereby extending the range and power of the allusion. Universally sinister images such as the “bird of prey” and the “full-moon night” in its “icy brilliance” are all framed by the growing darkness, “dense” with fear. The poem revives an ancient image of destruction, not only to lament the present darkness but also to warn us of its inevitable “fall upon us, the dwellers in shadow.”