Out of Egypt:

not failing? (an essay on Levertov)

So I got the Levertov poetry essay done for Contemporary Lit. Wow, my eyes burn. I feel like I've written a four-page love letter to a dead Anglo-American female author. I hope that I did the poem justice, and didn't interpret it backwards or something.

By the way it's on the same poem that I posted way back a few weeks ago.

Enjoy.

"Soutine" and Unfaithfulness to Creation

“Soutine (Two Paintings)” is a shocking poem, depicting, not the beauty of creation or the grandeur of God, but the work of an artist who seems to deny both. In it, Denise Levertov, the poet of the incarnational image, responds to the distorted images of the painter Chaim Soutine. Therefore, it is impossible to grasp the poem’s full meaning without some knowledge of Soutine and his work. To try would be like entering a conversation that is already half over.

Soutine was a French expressionist painter between the two world wars (Benfrey Online). He, like the enigmatic figure of “Wings in the Pedlar’s Pack,” was a wandering Jew; though born in Lithuania, he headed for Paris as his artistic fortunes improved (Tigertail Online). At first, the critics did not appreciate his work: Waldemar George wrote of it in 1928, “Is this not the art of an exile or a savage?” (Benfrey Online) In Slate, Christopher Benfrey describes his early paintings, like Still Life with Herrings and Red Stairs at Cagnes, as “little parables of deprivation.”

In “Soutine (Two Paintings),” Levertov recreates with surrealistic fidelity the crudities of these two paintings – their world of “avid” forks, “wavering” houses, and “famished” steps. However, she forms again this world of lurid sterility only to reject it.

Her desire to repudiate Soutine’s portrayal of reality is evident from the poem’s placement within the broader context of section III, from its hyperbolic use of imagery and personification in the description of the two paintings, and from the two editorial comments she makes on the paintings – in the first stanza, an exclamation; in the second, a question.

In most of Levertov’s works, she seeks to depict nature faithfully, as God sees it. She recognizes its otherness, its basic indifference to man, as when she says in “Two Mountains,” “I had to accept…my own complete insignificance,” (58) and when she says in “In Tonga,” “If [bats] could think / it would not be of us” (59). The aim of her life and her poetry, as expressed in “Flickering Mind,” is to “focus [her] flickering,” to “perceive/ at the fountain’s heart / the sapphire I know is there” (64). This requires of the artist humility, not Romantic, expressionistic boldness. Often Levertov’s writing, as in “Early” and “The Braiding” seems to shrink back behind itself, as if it had no theme and no author, except for the divine Author whose glory it seeks to express. He is “the stream, the fish, the light / the pulsing shadow” (64). He is the Word with whom she wrestles, until the “glass bubble” of dulled perception shatters (53).
Man is not the measure in Levertov’s poems. “Soutine” is an exception. Here nearly all the objects in the poem are personified, made grotesque with desire. The forks of lines 1 and 2 are “avid,” though the only thing before them is three “dead scrawny” herrings (line 3). Presumably, they will never receive sustenance from these insubstantial fish either – their role is simply to be the instrument carrying sustenance to the hungry artist, who stands outside the work. The steps of lines 7 to 10 also hunger, in Levertov’s account of these two paintings. She describes them as “famished,” clutching and crawling interminably toward a nearly invisible summit. The houses in line 16 “lean, wavering” in expectation. The cup of lines 14 and 15 is both “parched” and “abandoned.” All are described as “desperate things” (line 9).

The objects Levertov presents in Soutine are portrayed as simply and as starkly as possible, using only personifying verbs and adjectives and color indications. The plate in line 4 is “dead white,” the steps in the next line “red,” the “void” in line 13 “grey” – a somber palette with which to work.

This hyperbolic use of personification, combined with a paucity of adjectival description, is not characteristic of Levertov. Even in “Envy,” though the bare trees “make up” their seed bundles as if they were pilgrims preparing for a journey, they are still recognizably trees (62). Even in the original paintings by Soutine, reality did not appear this skewed. However, Levertov is not breaking from her usual style simply out of boredom. The lurid starkness of the poem’s imagery, with its dramatic contrast to her usual subtlety, is intended to show the distortion inherent in the work of Soutine and his successors, their unfaithfulness to creation.

Levertov breaks out, halfway through her account of the two paintings, in an exclamation that shows her anguish at seeing art of this kind. “O desperate things,” she cries, “living lives unheeded, / disbelieved / by those who made them!” (ll. 10-12) With these words, she is questioning the idea of art which, in order to express human emotion, requires distortion of reality. Levertov’s art seeks rather to mirror the world, and thus to mirror the self. Her art speaks of fullness, of the “fountain,” (64), not the “void,” the “parched hollow” (54, ll. 13, 15).

Yet section III is a section of doubt. “Soutine (Two Paintings)” is appropriately placed within it, practically at the midpoint between her invocation of the Angel and her speaking of the “Sapphire [she] know[s] is there” (64). Soutine, if these paintings are any indication, could not overcome the doubt that Levertov so strongly feels, the doubt that makes her question whether she can write of beauty and grace. His art portrays vividly desire and deprivation, mankind’s state without the Savior. Levertov wonders also whether the cup of creation is “abandoned” (l. 54). She closes the poem, in lines 18 to 20, with a question, not an answer: “…[W]hat could there be, / up there, / to fulfill desire?”

Transcendence is not easy for Levertov to find – she seeks it through the everyday. Flannery O’Connor called this showing “grace through nature, mystery through manners.” “What could there be…?” Levertov does not answer the question here; after what Soutine’s paintings show, a word about Christ would seem facile. Still, the mystery of Christ is her answer to Soutine – He is “the stream, the fish, the light, the pulsing shadow” (64). He, as she says later in A Door in the Hive, is our example. Though “aching for home,” “He must return, / first, in Divine patience, and know / hunger again, and give / to humble friends the joy / of giving Him food – fish and a honeycomb” (105-106). His is the meal that satisfies.

Works Cited

Benfrey, Christopher. "The Wandering Jew." Slate: 6 May 1998.

Levertov, Denise. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1984.

The Tigertail Virtual Musuem. Director Robert Uzgalis. 12 Nov. 2003.