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Denise Levertov's What Were They Like? is the Conflict cluster's most distinctive elegy for a destroyed culture. Written during the Vietnam War, the poem uses a question-and-answer form: an unseen questioner asks six questions about a people who "are gone," and an unseen respondent answers each one. The form is ancient — catechism, inquiry, even anthropological survey — and Levertov uses it to mourn a culture she fears has been erased. For Edexcel this poem pairs naturally with Exposure (civilians and soldiers facing cultural erasure), with War Photographer (representing distant violence), and with Half-caste (cultural identity under threat).
Denise Levertov (1923–1997) was a British-born American poet, active in the anti-Vietnam-War movement in the 1960s. What Were They Like? was published in 1966 in her collection The Sorrow Dance. The United States was then bombing rural Vietnam on a large scale; Levertov's poem responds to the cultural effects of that conflict without describing the military action.
The six questions in the poem concern traditional Vietnamese cultural practices: the carving of stone lanterns, the decoration of buddhist altars, the use of bone and ivory, singing, proverbs, poetic tradition. Levertov's point is that a culture is made of such practices, and that when they stop, a people has been lost.
Exam context rule: one sentence on the 1960s Vietnam context is enough.
The poem is in two numbered sections. Section 1 contains six numbered questions asked by an unseen voice about "the people of Viet Nam": did they use stone lanterns? did they use bone and ivory ornamentally? did they sing? did they tell stories? did they use proverbs? was their speech like poetry? Section 2 contains six numbered answers from a second unseen voice. The answers are cautious, tentative, and gradually accumulate into an elegy. The respondent is not sure; "it is not remembered"; "there was an echo yet / of their speech." The closing answer is the poem's most famous line: "It is silent now."
Two voices. The first (questioner) is impersonal, faintly academic — almost the voice of an anthropologist or student inquiring about a vanished culture. The second (respondent) is hesitant, elegiac, unwilling to claim more knowledge than he or she has.
Neither voice is named, placed or given a time. Levertov refuses to identify them, which universalises the form. This could be any questioner asking after any destroyed culture. The form is ancient and the historical referent is specific.
| Feature | Detail | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Question-and-answer; two numbered sections | Catechism-like, formal |
| Questions | 6 numbered | Anthropological register |
| Answers | 6 numbered, matching the questions | Mirrored structure |
| Rhyme | None | Unadorned |
| Metre | Free verse, varying line lengths | Speech-like |
| Tense | Past throughout | The culture is already lost |
The question-and-answer form is the poem's most striking feature. It echoes many traditions — religious catechism, school quiz, ethnographic interview — and by the closing lines it has become an elegy. The form itself is the argument: culture is communicated through question-and-answer, and Levertov uses the very form of cultural transmission to mark its failure.
flowchart LR
A[Section 1: Six questions about Vietnamese cultural practices] --> B[Section 2: Six answers from unseen respondent]
B --> C[Answers grow more tentative]
C --> D[Closing: It is silent now]
The structural arc moves from specific cultural inquiry to increasing uncertainty to final silence. The last answer, "It is silent now," completes the form by refusing to answer — silence is both the response and the subject.
The six questions name concrete cultural practices: stone lanterns, ornamentation, singing, storytelling, proverbs, poetic speech. These are not trivial details; they are the materials of a culture. Levertov is asking the questions that an anthropologist would ask, and she is implying that if the answers are lost, the culture itself is lost.
The respondent's hesitation is central. "Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. / It is not remembered whether in gardens / stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways." The phrase "it is not remembered" is the heart of the poem's elegiac register. Knowledge is failing; memory is going; the culture is slipping out of the record.
"It is silent now." Four words. Two beats. The closing answer refuses to complete the form. The questioner has asked about poetic speech; the respondent can only report silence. The refusal to answer becomes itself the answer.
"Stone lanterns" run through the poem. A stone lantern is made of permanent material but gives light only when lit. The image holds both endurance and fragility. By the final lines the lanterns are "gone"; the permanence was an illusion.
Both poems use form to enact the destruction of the experience they describe. Owen's pararhyme denies resolution; Levertov's refused closing answer denies cultural survival. Both are anti-war poems in which the enemy is not another army but the destruction of meaning itself. The contrast: Owen writes from inside the soldier's stasis; Levertov writes from outside the culture being lost, as a witness after the fact.
Both are civilian poems about distant violence. Duffy's photographer holds images; Levertov's respondent holds fading memories. Both poems worry about the representation of violence: what the photograph captures, what the answer captures. Both refuse heroic register.
Both poems foreground cultural identity under threat. Agard defends his speaker's mixed heritage through rhetorical analogy; Levertov mourns the passing of a culture through elegiac question-and-answer. The contrast of tone — defiance versus elegy — shows two responses to cultural erasure.
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