to the agent of complete destruction whose only concern is itself. The act of blinding the stars is a paradoxical image of cosmic finality. The hunt for the wild swan that begins the third quatrain articulates the destruction of the remnant of sentience--beauty--following physical destruction. It is also a way of articulating despair, and the poet watches Shiva assume solitary significance, "alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, / Empty darkness under the death-tent wings" (l. 11-12). The couplet that closes the sonnet expresses the shift from perfect destruction to the creative principle, which has the image of a new nest of bird's eggs out of which the new universe will be formed.
It is difficult not to conclude that the couplet is--and is meant to be--unconvincing, or at least less convincing than the elaborate destruction that precedes it. Why renewal might be thought of as somewhat unlikely is indirectly suggested by the date of the poem, 1937, a time when world war was looming. Jeffers's biography includes the information that he was opposed to U.S. involvement in World War II (Ellmann and O'Clair 247).
In this brief poem, Levertov takes up the theme of divine creation and presence in human experience in a somewhat playful way, by describing a quasi-sexual interlude with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. A key to the poem's meaning is the couplet "She is a sow / and I a pig and a poet." That "couples" divine and human experience, with the poet declaring herself made in the image of God, then asserting herself against the divine in the universe by biting back after being almost devoured, then by, as it were, mixing it up with the divine in the messiness of ordinary existence, here described as "the black of desire." Although that can be interpreted sexually, such an interpretation tends to limit the potential meaning. That is because the huma
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