In the Land of Shinar (Style)

Style

It is tempting to call the style of “In the Land of Shinar” free verse, because a quick reading reveals the poem’s lack of regular meter, line length, and rhyme pattern. By the fourth line, we see that enjambment and line breaks, rather than formal metrics, dictate much of the breathing and pace of the poem. It is more profitable, however, to look at the style of this poem in light of Levertov’s desire for a more precise terminology. For reasons she outlined in the essay “On the Need for New Terms,” Levertov preferred the term “exploratory form” for those poems that have sought, and found, a form that reveals the unique content of a moment of perception and feeling. There must be form, Levertov insists; otherwise there is no art.

Vers libre (“free verse”) was a term first employed in nineteenth-century France for poems that rebelled against the alexandrine meter. Levertov argued that by the late twentieth century, the term “free verse” had come to be used “for every kind of poem that is not written in a traditional form,” and thus “implies the rejection of every restriction.” When most critics use the term “free verse” today, they are describing, she said, “a certain invertebrate sort of poem that meanders along in search, perhaps, of its still undiscovered form.” A free-verse poem is not ready to be art until the poet turns from “meandering” to a more intentional “exploring,” which results in forms Levertov called “vertebrate and cohesive.”

Thus, to critique “In the Land of Shinar” in Levertov’s own terms is to examine its “exploratory form” — to look for the ways in which the poem’s form reveals its content. This poem becomes “vertebrate and cohesive” in its focused attention on the Tower of Babel and the shadow it casts. Its lines explore the subject by re-presenting the rise and fall of the tower. The poem begins and ends with “the shadow,” and, in between, we witness both the steady growth of darkness and the final terror of collapse. At the height of building, in the middle of the poem (lines 10 through 19), the lines are appropriately at their longest. But two very short lines (14 and 20) interrupt that confident progress. The phrase “We catch” is poised in air, like the falling strain of the “worksong.” The next line reveals, however, that it is not a song we catch; it is only noise. Likewise, the words “the heavens” are held “aloft” on line 20 via their placement far toward the right margin. This arrangement uses visual form to reinforce the important idea that the heavens “arch” and “evade” our human striving. Because of the way these short lines appear on the page — with syntactic cohesion — the poem fairly begs us to explore what happens when they are read together: “we catch ... the heavens.” That, of course, is the delusion that motivates the builders of any such tower. Not by these means or motivations, the poem suggests in both form and content, will we “catch the heavens.” The final lines “fall” back to the left margin, undoing, in an avalanche of verbs and nouns, all that our “massive / weight of dream and weight of will” has built in vain. The particular form of “In the Land of Shinar” is not “re-usable.” Levertov believed that every poem calls for a form unique to its “inscape,” the inner landscape of its feeling, its perception, and the moment of awareness it explores.