What Were They Like? — Denise Levertov
Interrogating a Vanished People
“What Were They Like?” is built from six questions followed by six answers, as if someone is being questioned about a civilisation that no longer exists. Denise Levertov never names the questioner, but several answers begin with the single word “Sir” — as though a survivor or witness is being cross-examined by an official, perhaps a soldier or journalist. The whole poem takes the form of a catechism, but instead of confirming shared belief, each answer confirms devastation.
Denise Levertov and the Vietnam War
Denise Levertov (1923–1997) was a British-born poet who moved to the United States and became one of the most outspoken poetic voices against the Vietnam War. American bombing campaigns in Vietnam during the 1960s killed huge numbers of civilians and destroyed villages, farmland and cultural sites. Levertov did not report from Vietnam; instead, she imagined a conversation in which someone tries — and fails — to describe a country’s way of life after it has been wiped out by war.
The poem’s questions imagine a peaceful, intact culture — asking about “lanterns of stone,” “quiet laughter,” and “an epic poem.” The answers reveal that war has destroyed it all: “their light hearts turned to stone,” “there were no more buds,” and finally, “It is silent now.”
Themes: Erasure, Memory and Guilt
The central theme is cultural erasure. Every question asks about something ordinary and beautiful — ceremonies, ornaments, laughter, poetry, song — and every answer replaces it with an image of destruction. When the questioner asks whether the Vietnamese people had “an epic poem,” the answer refuses the question: “It is not remembered” is followed by the reminder that “most were peasants” whose life “was in rice and bamboo.” Only the final question, about speech and singing, receives the answer that their speech survives as “an echo yet” before “It is silent now.”
A second theme is the failure of memory. The phrase “It is not remembered” recurs twice, word for word — a repeated refrain. (The poem’s true anaphora is the run of questions beginning “Did they”.) This repetition suggests that even the voice trying to answer cannot fully reconstruct what has been lost. A third theme is guilt: by addressing the answers to “Sir,” Levertov puts the reader in the position of the questioner — someone who assumed a whole people could be reduced to a list of facts, and who is now confronted with what that assumption has cost.
Levertov writes in free verse, with long, unevenly broken lines that mimic natural speech rather than following a set pattern. Constant enjambment — for example, “There is an echo yet / of their speech which was like a song” — keeps images incomplete until the next line resolves them, echoing how the culture itself has been left unfinished. The poem’s two halves are unbalanced: six hopeful questions crowd the opening, while the six answers that follow are calm, flat and devastating, changing the poem’s pace from curiosity to horror.
Key Language and Imagery
Levertov’s central technique is to let each answer directly undo its matching question. The question about “lanterns of stone” is met with the claim that “It is not remembered” whether such lanterns ever lit peaceful gardens. The question about “quiet laughter” is answered with “laughter is bitter to the burned mouth” — the adjective “burned” turns a gentle image into a wound. Ornament, once made from jade and silver, becomes “All the bones were charred”: material beauty is replaced by the debris of bodies.
The poem also stresses that “most were peasants,” whose life was in “rice and bamboo” — ordinary, agricultural, unremarkable. That ordinariness is shattered when “bombs smashed those mirrors,” the flooded paddies that once reflected peaceful clouds, so that “there was time only to scream.” Even sound is stolen: their speech, once like a song that “resembled the flight of moths in moonlight,” survives only as “an echo yet.” The final line — “It is silent now” — closes the poem on total absence, denying the reader any comforting answer.
The answers are addressed to “Sir,” which frames the whole poem as a formal interrogation or witness statement. This makes the reader complicit in the questioner’s assumption that a culture can be summarised as a checklist — an assumption the answers repeatedly refuse to satisfy.
Song and silence: “Songs for the People” by Frances Harper imagines music replacing the discord of conflict with something hopeful. Levertov’s poem works in the opposite direction — a culture’s song fades to silence. Comparing the two draws out how each poet uses sound and music to represent very different relationships between conflict and hope.
Guilt and inaction: Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily during the War” also implicates its audience in destruction it did nothing to stop. Both poets use direct address — Kaminsky’s parenthetical apology and Levertov’s “Sir” — to make readers feel responsible rather than simply informed.
Remembering the past: Fred D’Aguiar’s “Papa-T” and Louise Bennett’s “Colonization in Reverse” both look back at empire and its aftermath, asking what survives once conflict ends. Comparing either with Levertov’s poem draws out how difficult, selective and incomplete memory of conflict can be — whether that memory is affectionate, comic or devastating.
Using This Poem in the Exam
“What Were They Like?” works well for both parts of the poetry question. If it is the printed poem, its clear question-and-answer structure gives you an easy way to compare ideas and attitudes against an unseen poem — look for how the unseen poem also builds towards or away from an ending. If you choose it for the second part, its short, exact phrases — “It is not remembered,” “there were no more buds,” “It is silent now” — are easy to memorise and quote precisely from memory.