In the Land of Shinar (Criticism)

Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

Emily Archer

Emily Archer is an independent scholar and freelance writer who has taught at colleges in the South and the Northeast, has published many articles on contemporary American writers, and leads poetry workshops and reading groups in New Hampshire. In the following essay, Archer examines the relationship of poetry and prophecy in “In the Land of Shinar” and other poems from Denise Levertov’s 1992 volume, Evening Train.

Here and Now (1956) is the title of the second book of poetry Denise Levertov published, her first in America. But it is not simply the title of one book; it is an emblem for her unflagging engagement, over five decades, with history in the making, the here and now. In “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival,” one of her most important aesthetic statements as a mature artist, Levertov asserts, “I think the arts are — among other things — a way into history.” This statement counters the suggestion posed to her that the arts are an “evasion,” collective or personal, from the tragedies and complexities of the world. The poet’s “way into history,” for Levertov, involves creating both a “poetry of anguish” and a “poetry of praise.” What emerges not only from her essay, but from the whole body of her poems, is a portrait of the artist as prophet. And while nearly any volume could provide significant features in this portrait, Evening Train (1992) captures the lights and shadows of Levertov’s maturity, revealing the motifs characteristic of her legacy.

In 1972, when NBC-TV invited Levertov to “comment on any topic, e.g., poetry, women, the war,” she prefaced her response with a definition of the poet’s task: “to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.” The task at that specific moment was to state what history was asking of her art, to be

writing more and more poems of grief, of rage, concerning the despoilment of the earth and of all life upon it, of the systematic destruction of all that we feel passionate love for, both by the greed of industry and by the mass murder we call war. We are living at war....

The producer chose not to air the statement, thinking it “inappropriate” in light of “the number of Vietnam statements we have already had on the program.” Levertov not only found the rejection “in the name of ‘balanced coverage’ ... a little short on sincerity,” but also felt that “a ‘balanced’ view of genocide and of actions which are leading directly toward the extinction of life on earth is itself a kind of insanity.”

“In the Land of Shinar,” published twenty years later in Evening Train, suggests that the world is no closer to peace. “Each year / the tower grows taller,” the poem says (in an allusion to the ill-fated Tower of Babel), as our lethal insanity spirals “out of its monstrous root-circumference.” Long after the war in Vietnam ended, Levertov continued to “sing and say” all that she could about a world she believed more and more to resemble the “land of Shinar,” engulfed in a “great shadow” of its own making and imminent unmaking. But it is not enough for Levertov to rage against this ominous “dying of the light.” Her task also requires singing all that can be sung about the wonder, beauty, and mystery of the here and now, in “poignant contrast ... to the evil we are conscious of day and night.” Her laments accrue their stirring power for her readers, in part, because she is also such an artist of praise. In the words of a Shaker tune, her poems show us how to “bow and be simple” before the humblest members of creation, seeing in them a presence that deserves recognition and reverence. In her poems of praise, Levertov shows us what we could lose, and it is more than we realized.

Thus, in every decade of Levertov’s work, readers can find poems that mourn and warn alongside of poems that celebrate. Evening Train laments with the voice of a Jeremiah in poems such as “The Certainty” and “In the Land of Shinar.” But the volume also sings as a psalmist, raptly present to Presence on her walks in the forest, in her steady gaze at Mount Rainier, or in naming the “pure / undoubtable being” of otherwise unnoticed and “unloved” forms of life, as in “Brother Ivy” or “Flowers of Sophia.” In Levertov’s practice of poetry and prophecy, history is not “made” simply by media-worthy world events, but by the recognition of happenings equally momentous in the natural world and in ordinary lives. This approach to history is shared by Czech poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry:

By experience I mean not only feeling the direct pressure of History, with a capital H, in the form of fire falling from the sky, invasions by foreign armies, or ruined cities. Historicity may reveal itself in a detail of architecture, in the shaping of a landscape, even in trees like those oaks close to my birthplace which remember my pagan ancestors. Yet only an awareness of the dangers menacing what we love allows us to sense the dimension of time and to feel in everything we see and touch the presence of past generations.

Because “prophecy” has been reduced so drastically to a synonym for “prediction,” our contemporary use of the word is associated most often with palm readings, horoscopes, or cultish speculations about the future. Even Levertov admits that “there was a time when I felt the association [between prophecy and poetry] was hyperbolic, because I was thinking too exclusively of the predictive sense of the word prophecy.” Over the years, she has been variously praised and accused by critics for her politically engaged poems, many of them apocalyptic in tone. More from a need to consider the poet’s vocation than from a defense of her own practice, Levertov is compelled to “give an account for the presence of the political in the literary” and, therefore, to account for the prophetic task of the poet in the world. In the process of doing so, in “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival,” Levertov not only revives the powerful Hebraic understanding of the prophet’s role, she also adds her own dimension. The basic model for prophets in Western culture, she believes, are in the Old Testament — Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, for example,

and whether or not we take them to be gifted with foreknowledge ... they have without question other roles too: they warn of the effects and consequences of evildoing and foolishness; they upbraid the people for wrong or stupid behavior; and they take a powerful stand against corrupt and oppressive rulers.... Above all, I would add, the prophets provide words of witness.

A witness, in any context, is someone who provides personal, firsthand knowledge of something seen, heard, or experienced. A witness is awake, aware, and willing to give an account of the here and now. When that witness is a poet, according to Levertov, his or her words must be said “powerfully, with imagination and linguistic resourcefulness,” so that the utterance of the poet-prophet “transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes.” It is not enough to warn; the poet’s words must also transform.

There is a strong connection between the inclusion of the word “witness” in Levertov’s definition of the poet-prophet and “Witnessing from Afar,” her title for the group of poems that includes “In the Land of Shinar” and fifteen other poems of political, environmental, and social concerns. Twenty-five years earlier, Levertov’s “witness” was undoubtedly “up close.” Along with her husband, Mitchell Goodman, she was an active demonstrator and rally leader in the peace movement during the Vietnam era, and she traveled to North Vietnam in 1972 on behalf of the Women’s Union and Writer’s Union with poets Muriel Rukeyser and Jane Hart. Upon returning, she spoke on many American campuses about what she saw, including the victims of napalm bombs and the remains of Vietnamese hospitals and villages that had been destroyed in U.S. attacks. But the so-called end of the war was hardly the end of Levertov’s engagement. In the years to follow, until her death in 1997, she participated in numerous antinuclear protests and freeze rallies, environmental causes, the El Salvador resistance (from which emerged her oratorio, “El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation”), and protests of the Gulf War. In the words of a recent poem, “when it was claimed / the war had ended, it had not ended.” Levertov believed that we are inexorably “living at war” until our imaginations of peace can truly be embodied. Peace is not merely the absence of war, in Levertov’s definition; it is the sure presence of a new world order.

By the time she published Evening Train in 1992, Levertov’s health kept her from the physically strenuous activity of witnessing “up close.” Her witness, however, was no less powerful in her later years — “from afar” being less a comment about her limitations (for her readers, anyway) than about the wider perspective afforded by age and experience. “In the Land of Shinar” is exemplary of those poems, more numerous in her later years, that reach “afar” in time and place for myths that timelessly serve her concerns. The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel, built on the plain of Shinar, becomes a powerful image in Levertov’s imagination for the construction of our own destruction, which she viewed as inevitable if we do not correct our insatiable hunger for power over the earth and each other. The Old Testament story and Levertov’s poetic version of it both warn, clearly and urgently, of the consequences of human arrogance and of god-less projects to “make a name for ourselves” (in the words from Genesis 11:4).

In Levertov’s posthumous volume, This Great Unknowing (1999), editor Paul Lacey makes an apology for the fact that the book could not be organized any other way than chronologically, the order in which Levertov wrote her last poems. “Had Denise Levertov lived longer,” Lacey speculates, “they would have been organized, probably into subsections, according to thematic or other aesthetic principles.” In all but her earliest volumes, Lacey continues, “Levertov carefully arranged the order of poems so that both individual works and groups of poems could throw light on one another and themes and counterthemes could weave larger patterns.” In light of Levertov’s habit of composition, it is important to notice the placement and context of “In the Land of Shinar” in Evening Train. If the reader proceeds through the book in the order the poems appear, by the time he or she comes to the first line of “In the Land of Shinar” and its ominous shadow, the dangerous architectures designed by our “weight of will” already have names supplied by the fifteen poems that precede it in “Witnessing from Afar.” Military prowess, denial of death, erosion of language, distortions of the media, violence — all have mounted like the poem’s “searching / bird of prey.” Many images in those poems depend for their prophetic power on the reader’s knowledge of facts and concerns from the last half century. “The Reminder” uses the terminology of cancer, and “Mid-American Tragedy” employs vocabulary pertaining to AIDS. “Airshow Practice” uses the Blue Angels as a synecdoche to represent the whole of our violent idolatries. “Hoping” contains a dream image that all too closely resembles the devastation of a nuclear holocaust, and “The Youth Program” critiques the new generation of video games that have replaced simpler toys and

“Levertov’s work reveals that when the prophet is also a poet, language becomes both balancing rod and divining rod in the journey along those borderlands.”

outdoor play. Thus, by the time we reach “In the Land of Shinar,” the last poem in the group, the Old Testament story has become far more than an extended literary allusion to a time and place “afar” from our own. “We live in an unprecedented time,” Levertov asserted,

a time when as we all know the fate of the Earth itself lies in the balance as never before; when day by day powerful forces all over the globe are tipping that balance further towards extinction.

Therefore, she continues, the poet is obligated to answer the need for “direct images in our art that will waken, warn, stir their hearers to action; images that will both appall and empower.” The story’s power to warn and predict has been returned to our time, revitalized against the backdrop of contemporary diseases and idolatries that Denise Levertov witnessed, and transformed, into poetry.

No reading of a particular Levertov poem is complete without some attention to the way it reflects and refracts the energy of the poems that precede and follow it. The same can be said of her groups of poems. The tone of the poems in “Witnessing from Afar” is dark and sung in minor keys. They reveal the lamenting, raging, grieving dimension of the poet-prophet’s task. But they are neither the first word, nor the last. The darkening heights of human arrogance in “In the Land of Shinar” provide a dramatic counterpoint to the poems of “Lake Mountain Moon,” the opening section of Evening Train. In “Settling,” the book’s first poem, it is not the cycle of a shadow we follow, but that of a light, the “restless sun / forever rising and setting.” This semi-autobiographical poem is far removed from the inhospitable sounds and sights of Babel’s exhausting labor and the unnatural restlessness of its wheeling birds. Having just moved from the East Coast to Seattle, Levertov discovered:

I was welcomed here — clear gold
of late summer, of opening autumn,
the dawn eagle sunning himself on the highest tree ...

Her series of psalm-like praises for Mount Rainier and the landscape at its feet begins, in this poem, with quite a different relationship to “height”:

the mountain revealing herself unclouded, her snow
tinted apricot as she looked west ....

In another poem, the mountain’s mysterious comings and goings create its own kind of architecture —

a rhythm elusive as that of a sea-wave
higher than all the rest, riding to shore
flying its silver banners —

In “Open Secret,” the last poem of “Lake Mountain Moon,” Levertov’s reverence for Rainier culminates in a promise not to “visit” its heights:

This one is not, I think, to be known
by close scrutiny, by touch of foot or hand ....

Instead, she is willing to witness its beauty from afar:

This mountain’s power
lies in the open secret of its remote
apparition, silvery low-relief
coming and going moonlike at the horizon,
always loftier, lonelier, than I ever remember.

These acts of praise that open the book and continue, in poems such as “Steadfast,” “Range,” and “Arctic Spring,” embody Levertov’s conviction that the poet-prophet must impart hope as well as articulate dread. “Just to tell the Tate” of our engulfing shadow “and walk away isn’t enough,” she argues in “Poetry, Prophecy, Survival”:

a poetry of praise is equally necessary, that we not be overcome by despair but have the constant incentive of envisioned positive possibility — and because praise is an irresistible impulse of the soul.

There is no self-righteousness in the tone of these poems, no indication that Levertov believed she or her poetry has reached the perfect balance between praise and lament. Many poems from her last years are honest about the discomforts of being a poet in the eerie twilight of the late-twentieth century and of living suspended between doubt and belief in the world’s continuance. In ancient literature, it is not unusual to find a prophet sitting in the doorway to the city or the temple, poised on the edge where witnessing has the advantage of some distance. Regardless of time or place, says Levertov’s “Protestors,” it is not simply a matter of

Living on the rim
of the cauldron, disasters
witnessed but
not suffered in the flesh.

There is also a responsibility:

The choice: to speak
or not to speak.
We spoke.

The prophet inhabits the thin places between despair and delight, anger and wonder, destruction and creation, absence and presence. Levertov’s work reveals that when the prophet is also a poet, language becomes both balancing rod and divining rod in the journey along those borderlands. Evening Train’s final poem, “Suspended,” witnesses in intimate first person the challenge and tenuous assurance in being called to “sing and say” all that one can under the growing shadow:

I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to
      remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.

Source: Emily Archer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• In her “Author’s Note” to Tesserae: Memories and Suppositions (1995), Denise Levertov explains both the title and the purpose of this prose collection: “These tesserae have no pretensions to forming an entire mosaic. They are merely fragments, composed from time to time in between poems.” The “fragments” she speaks of are numerous incidents and memories from her personal history, including vignettes of her father’s childhood in Russia; her pilgrimage to Cezanne’s studio; sketches of childhood friends, pets, and dolls; her last hours in Tonga in the late 1970s; and formative memories of “not meeting” artists. Aside from an essay-length “sketch,” this book is the closest Levertov comes to writing autobiography.
• William Carlos Williams, one of the most important voices in modern American poetry, was an unofficial, but powerful “mentor” of Denise Levertov. She met Williams shortly after moving to New York from England and learned from him important ways of hearing American speech, seeing the world, and persisting in her work. The friendship that emerged through their many visits and letters is revealed in The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (1998), recently collected and edited by Christopher MacGowan and published by New Directions. It is not merely the chronicle of an artistic friendship but a window into the formation of American poetry in this century.
• Denise Levertov’s childhood was steeped in rich stories from her father’s Jewish Hasidic background. German-Jewish theologian Martin Buber, author of the classic I and Thou (1958), became interested in the legends of Hasidism and collected them in his two-volume work, The Tates of the Hasidim (1975). Buber also compiled twenty stories of the Baal-Shem, legendary founder of Hasidim, in The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1955). In this work, the Hasidic master’s life is “told” through the fantastic, humorous, and always profound stories that “contain the dream and the longing of a people.” Even a few stories, along with the introductions from Buber’s collections, can help readers mine the rich implications of Hasidic terms in Levertov’s poems, as well as introduce them to a fascinating body of folklore.
• Long ago, poetry — in the form of epics, song cycles, ballads, and psalms — was the primary means for sharing and teaching a culture’s values, stories, and visions. Considering our age of multiculturalism and mass media, Dana Gioia asked a relevant question that became the title of his popular and controversial book, Can Poetry Matter? Essays on Poetry and American Culture (1992). Gioia is concerned that poets have unwittingly (or not) backed themselves into a corner of society that is increasingly ignored, except by other poets belonging to its “subculture.” The “Poetry in Motion” project, which displays poems in mass transit vehicles across the United States is one answer to the problem Gioia describes.