{"id":101937,"date":"2016-08-25T15:28:11","date_gmt":"2016-08-25T19:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101937"},"modified":"2016-08-25T16:11:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-25T20:11:54","slug":"the-mutes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/25\/the-mutes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mutes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Louis-Emile<\/a>

Louis-Emile Adan, The Suitor<\/em>, oil on canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

Denise Levertov\u2019s poem\u00a0<\/em>\u201cThe Mutes\u201d appeared in our Winter 1965 issue<\/a>. Levertov was born in Britain but immigrated to the United States when she was twenty-five; she died in 1997.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway<\/p>\n

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,<\/p>\n

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue<\/p>\n

but meant for music?<\/p>\n

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filled with smoke?<\/p>\n

Perhaps both.<\/p>\n

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,<\/p>\n

knows it\u2019s a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they\u2019d pass her in silence:<\/p>\n

so it\u2019s not only to say she\u2019s
a warm hole. It\u2019s a word<\/p>\n

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down<\/p>\n

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can\u2019t,<\/p>\n

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors<\/p>\n

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly<\/p>\n

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding<\/p>\n

keeps on translating:
\u201cLife after life goes by<\/p>\n

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Denise Levertov\u2019s poem\u00a0\u201cThe Mutes\u201d appeared in our Winter 1965 issue. 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