“Intrusion” by Denise Levertov
While attending the University of North Carolina Greensboro, I took Advanced Poetry and one of the things I had to do was annotate some poetry. Here is one of those poems. Enjoy.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42530/intrusion
Upon first glance the poem appears to be in couplets of four stanzas with no rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. However, once one reads the first line of poem, one realizes this poem is anything but ordinary. The first line reads “After I had cut off my hands,” which shocks the reader but also intrigues the reader, at least for me personally. The reason this is so shocking is because the speaker is admitting to self mutilation but to that of his/her. Something else that is surprising is how the speaker could cut off their hands with their own hands. Maybe they could cut off one hand but how would they cut the other? So this first line definitely intrigues the reader.
Moving forward, the next line is even more shocking, for it reads, “and grown new ones.” The reader is even more surprised because the speaker grew back new ones. This also can lead the reader to believe that the speaker may have known this would happen, thus the reader may not believe the reader to be completely human or a humanoid of some kind.
In the next stanza, the speaker states, “something my former hands had longed for,” and now the reader feels bad for the speaker or at least the speaker’s hands. And in the next line it reads, “came and asked to be rocked.” Not only does the reader feel some sort of sympathy but also the reader wants to know what needed to be rocked by the speaker and is this the reason why the speaker cut off his/her hands in the first place. Did the speaker grow tiring of rocking this creature thus cutting off its hands so he/she wouldn’t have to rock it or that which was rocked would no longer want to be rocked?
This ideal repeats itself in the next two stanzas. The speaker stating in the third stanza that, “After my plucked out eyes/had withered, and new ones grown,” and in the fourth, “something my former eyes had wept for/cam asking to be pitied.” This gives the reader the impression that again the speaker did not want to cry for this pitied creature anymore, hence why they plucked their eyes out but that which was pitied returned and the speaker’s new eyes remembered what the old eyes felt; thus the speaker could not escape the tears or the rocking. So this leads the reader to believe that the speaker could never escape the one needing to be rocked or the one to be pitied.
This realization gives the poem a very dark, surreal feeling. The speaker’s attempts to discard that which caused him/her grief were futile to begin with. The speaker was never really going to escape his/her woes. Thus making the reader truly feel for the speaker and making the poem borderline morbid.
I say borderline because the title gives the poem a feel of irritation than morbidity. The title of this poem is called “Intrusion,” which leads the reader to believe that something keeps invading upon the speaker and it has become rather a nuisance; hence why the speaker rids themselves of their hands and their eyes, to get rid of the nuisances. So the tone of the poem, according to the title is more about annoyance than dark surrealism yet it still is about the inability to escape that which bothers the reader.
