Levis: The Mystery

The irony of Levis dying before he could finish this book titled Elegy is almost too much. You can’t even begin to plan something like that. I mentioned this to my group, but I can’t help but think that the reason why most of these poems seem like a jumbled puzzle is because of the sheer fact that they are unfinished. Who knows how many more drafts Levis would have done to the “Cook” poem, or the “Elegy Ending in the Sound of Skipping Rope”. There is absolutely no way to tell. As Levine writes at the beginning, he didn’t alter a single thing. He left the poems as they were when Levis died: “I have rewritten nothing. I have revised nothing.” (xi). This infuriates me, in a way. Because here we are, debating and trying to wring through his mess of Greek mythology and all these other references and word choices when they might not be what he actually meant. Take for instance, in the “Skipping Rope” poem, when Levis writes, “The characters met on faint blue paper. / They were thin as paper then.” (68). How do we know that he didn’t mean to repeat the word paper? Authors could look at that and say with a high and mighty tone that, “Oh yes, the repetition of the word ‘paper’ works well here because blahblahblah” but in reality, it could be a mistake. Later on in the poem, he asks the question, “What withered away?” (71). What if he meant to ask a different question, which could change the entire feel of that section of the poem? There are endless questions that can never be answered because the author is dead. I think you get my point. Anyway.

That being said, I think that these poems, as hard as they are to read through and understand, have a lot more said than what is written. Although, I will argue that you have to be either an English scholar or very knowledgeable about art history to completely understand the context sometimes. Such as in the first poem, “The Two Trees”, when it is talking about the tree being “In the shape of its limbs / As if someone’s cries for help / Had been muffled by them once, concealed there, / Her white flesh just underneath the slowly peeling bark” (4). In my first reading of it, I just thought he was personifying the tree. I had no idea it was referencing Apollo & Daphne in Greek mythology until it was explained in class. After knowing that, the ending of the poem made much more sense to me. But for just reading the poem, I shouldn’t have to do research to understand it. I love poems that make me think, and I love pondering over poetry with the best of them, but researching is just going a little bit too far for me.

To get back to my first point in the last paragraph, these poems really do have a lot more said than what is on the page. Take for instance the “Boy in Video Arcade”. This poem’s first three lines say so much in two sentences: “Some see a lake of fire at the end of it, / Or heaven’s guesswork, something always to be sketched in. / I see a sullen boy in a video arcade.” (19). My point is clear when in class, we debated the meaning of this for about half an hour. Is “it” death? Is “it” a tunnel? We’ll never know! Who is this boy? Is it Levis? We’ll never know. But I can’t even tell you how much I am in love with those three lines. For argument’s sake, I will just throw my idea that those lines must be in their final draft. Because if they were to be changed in some new drafts Levis might have made, I probably would cry. I almost think those three lines could be a poem that could stand on its own.

The mystery that is the unedited Elegy will no doubt be continually debated on and there won't ever be a clear answer. That bugs me, but that's just the way it goes.