Making Peace (1987). Detailed description

Published in 1987 as part of a collection titled Breathing the Water, “Making Peace” was written at a time when Levertov had already established herself as a politically engaged poet, having written, published, and protested throughout the Vietnam War. Although previous to Breathing the Water, the 1980s saw a period of concern with more explicitly religious matters, social issues never left her sphere of imagination. “Making Peace,” even without the devastating imagery found in some of her Vietnam-era poetry, clearly demonstrates her continued sense of distress over the violent political climate. Indeed, it makes apparent the increasing sense of responsibility she, as a writer, accepted for the failure of a culture to imagine peace.

The poem begins with an insistence that poets have a responsibility to “give us / imagination of peace . . . Peace, not only / the absence of war” (Selected Poems 150). The excerpt also uses the italicized phrase “imagination of disaster,” which Lever- tov in an explanatory note attributes to Henry James. She goes on to say in the same note that imagination makes reality real to the mind (214).

With that understanding, the difficulty of imagining peace becomes clear. Because we have not lived within a reality of peace, our imaginations have a hard time drawing upon an experience that would allow us to fathom it. The first stanza of “Making Peace” along with its companion note presents a dilemma: How can we imagine peace without experiencing it? And, how can we experience peace without first imagining it?

The poem explores that paradox and poses a solution, suggesting a way of literally “Making Peace.” The crux of the solution rests on a metaphor. Metaphor, a literary device common in poetry, compares two seemingly unlike things by equating them. In this case, Levertov compares the process of writing poetry with the process of creating peace. She writes that peace “can’t be imagined before it is made”:

can’t be known except in the words of its making, grammar of justice, syntax of mutual aid. (150)

By using literary terms usually employed to discuss the mechanics of poetry—such as rhythm, syntax, stanza, line—to discuss peace, she suggests that we can imagine peace only as a poet imagines a poem before it exists. In other words, she argues that poems and peace are made through a process of creation and that imagination does not exist outside that process. The action of imagining and the action of creating are simultaneous.

Although the poem seems to resolve the dilemma philosophically by offering a new framework for thinking about imagination, it does not offer a final answer. As is common in Levertov’s poetry, “Making Peace” retains a sense of mystery. The second half of the poem discusses the possibility of restructuring “the sentence our lives are making” (150). The gerund form of the verb to make indicates that the process of creation is unfinished and continuous. While the pessimistic view that things are going poorly marks “Making Peace,” a more optimistic awareness of new possibilities also presents itself. The poem ends with a bright image of vibrating light, “facets of the forming crystal.” A structure “of profit and power” exists, but it is undergoing formation and change (150).

For Discussion or Writing
1. “Making Peace” is not the only poem in which Levertov discusses poetry. Read other poems that have a similar self-awareness of their own medium—such as “The Jacob’s Ladder,” “Illustrious Ancestors,” and “Poem”—and compare the attitudes, the styles, and the methods used to explore the subject of poetry itself. Does Levertov present a consistent vision, or do specific poems offer specific views?

2. The poem differentiates between peace and “the absence of war.” Using the poem to support your response, explain the differences between the two states of nonviolence. Why would anyone consider peace more desirable than simply an end to warfare? If you do not believe that there is a difference between the two, construct a convincing argument to support your position and use the poem for specific discussion points.