With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
BY Denise Levertov
(New Directions, 1959)

I can’t remember my first encounter with poetry, but by the time I was ten years old, Denise Levertov’s With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads had become a favorite book. I don’t pretend that at such an early age I even approached an understanding of Levertov’s poems, which are filled with religious and spiritual references, literary allusions, and in her later work, strongly political themes. What captured me were the mysterious illuminations of ordinary life that I found in the book. Two poems, “With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” and “Girlhood of Jane Harrison,” with their dream-like qualities, appealed greatly to me as a young reader.

“With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” begins “With eyes at the back of our heads / we see a mountain” (p. 9). This intriguing sentence satisfied me as a young reader for a long time. “With eyes at the back of our heads” was enough to seed my imagination: the view from the back of one’s head would certainly be more wonderful and mysterious than the familiar one, from the front. For many months, years perhaps, I did not feel the need to finish the poem, for the first lines were magical enough. I drew pictures of eyes peering out from back-of-head hair, of people with their glasses on backwards, and other fanciful embodiments of a reversed world. I thought of what was going on behind me, and sometimes swung around quickly to catch a glimpse of it: in order to come closer to something, one would have to walk backwards towards it. The poem gave me hope that a parallel and more interesting universe existed, while the simple idea of being able to see behind oneself made me view the ordinary world in a new, electrically charged way.

…what fascinated me about this poem is its reversal of the ordinary. Levertov has the ability to render the mundane miraculous, but she is never overt. Her clean, spare lines give the imagination full rein.

Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, what fascinated me about this poem is its reversal of the ordinary. Levertov has the ability to render the mundane miraculous, but she is never overt. Her clean, spare lines give the imagination full rein. As a child reading her poetry, I sensed, albeit dimly, the skill with which she coaxed images from the recesses of my brain, how the line “With eyes at the back of our heads” began for me what was to become a lifelong poetic practice.

After I got a little older, I tried the rest of the poem. I went as far as the first line of the second stanza: “The doors before us in a façade” (p. 9). I had to look up the word “façade,” and reasoned the meaning to be somewhere between “the front of a building” and “superficiality,” the two given in my Webster’s dictionary. I came away with a picture of doors placed in a false front. I understood that the doors had something to do with simultaneously blocking and giving access to the mountain, the one that could be seen from “the back of our heads.” For children, doors often indicate a place between reality and imagination, a place where magical things can happen. The stanza reads:

As a slightly older child, I found the possibilities of the doors, like the idea of eyes at the back of my head, enough to ponder for some time. Eager for more mysteries, however, I tried to understand the rest of the poem, but it was still a slow process. The poem revealed itself to me bit by bit, over the years of reading. Never did I receive an easy answer, even after the most persistent gleaning; much hard work lay ahead of me. The more I read, the more I understood, and began to appreciate a type of poetry that does not give up all of its secrets too soon.

In “Whose Tradition?” William Stafford writes, “there is a dream going on while I am awake.” The image of doors set unevenly in an unreliable structure leads to a feeling of possibility, a sense of waking into a dream. Further on the poem states

In order to reach the mountain, the poem instructs us to move through the doors that may or may not lead to a house. This makes sense the way things in dreams make sense: every dream has its own peculiar logic that evaporates upon waking. What is left are a few clues perhaps, maybe a tenuous link to the rapidly fading dream. The doors link the reader to the behind-the-head view of the mountain; when the imperfect façade is corrected (“Set it to rights! / The knitter begins to knit”) Levertov writes, “the way to the mountain will clear, / the mountain we see with / eyes at the back of our heads…” (pp. 9-10).

Dreams have always been a source of inspiration for poets, but not all poems inspired by dreams are discernable as such. “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” (p. 25) is such a poem. This poem describes a girl who leans from a window, names marzipan and roses, and dances in the garden. Her naming of these objects gives them life and meaning, taste and fragrance, as if she had touched them with a magic wand. The poem’s power lies in its leisurely exposure of a moment in time. In order to fully appreciate a moment such as the one described in “Girlhood,” the reader must make a conscious effort to slow down and experience the poem frame by frame, absorbing each item as it is named: the cedar tree, the star-cake, the moon islands. Deep in a poem, long spaces connect moments of perception that have nothing to do with time as measured in the conventional way.

The poem’s power lies in its leisurely exposure of a moment in time. In order to fully appreciate a moment such as the one described in ‘Girlhood,’ the reader must make a conscious effort to slow down and experience the poem frame by frame…

In Levertov’s essay, “Interweavings: Reflections on the Role of Dream in the Making of Poems,”^[1] she explains that the poem describes a dream she had about Jane Harrison’s childhood. Levertov critiques the poem, writing that “this is a great danger of dream poems: that they remain subjective, private, inaccessible without the author’s gloss” (p. 32). As a reader, I had no idea that “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” derived from a dream, but I am not sure that such knowledge would have enhanced or detracted from my experience of the poem. Levertov distinguishes between poems that are derived from dreams and poems that just seem that way, and states “When a poem ‘feels like a dream’ it does so by the virtue of the clearness of its terms (however irrational they may be)” (p. 35). “With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” is such a poem: it operates within a peculiar dream-logic that fits it completely, but it is not vague and dream-like. From the first stanza, the poem makes its intentions clear:

This first stanza asks us to suspend our disbelief and to accompany the poet on a journey that she promises will be unlike any other. Levertov does not write “If we had eyes at the back of our heads;” she simply asserts that for the space of this poem, we have them, and that our purpose is to use them to see things from this viewpoint. The poem guides us, rather firmly, from the mountain to the doors and the knitter whose task is to balance the imperfections the architect sees:

Dreams make sense only within their own framework; “With Eyes” is similarly logical as a whole and completely separate experience. “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” describes rather than instructs, and although my understanding of the poem benefited from Levertov’s gloss, it is not too private for me to derive a meaning from. The star-cake, moon islands, and roses of marzipan allow us a way into her dream, made accessible with this poem. The playful images appealed to the child I once was; as an adult, I understand the poem’s message of moving outward, from smaller to larger and larger planes, as the garden “dissolved its boundaries.” “At a window — / so much is easy to see” (p. 25) — with or without the knowledge that a dream was the source of this poem, the reader is able to enter a dream-like state aided by the poem’s imagery, and invent for herself or himself what the poet sees from the window. The possibilities ripple through our imaginations.

“With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” and “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” opened the doors of poetry for me and became the foundation of a lifelong practice. Barely able, as a child, to discern the meaning in Denise Levertov’s poems, I nevertheless plumbed them for all the mystery I could find. I still read her regularly, and I still rely on the lessons I once learned through reading her poetry. To paraphrase Eavan Boland, I found poems I can grow old in. I still have the original book, the one I found in a bookshelf at home when I was a child, published by New Directions in 1959. I had to learn patience in order to read Levertov, and that lesson has stayed with me as an adult, eager to discover the meaning in poetry that might take a very long time to figure out.