The Full Text of “What Were They Like?”
The Full Text of “What Were They Like?”
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“What Were They Like?” Introduction
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Denise Levertov, an English-born American poet, published "What Were They Like" as part of her 1967 collection The Sorrow Dance. The poem was written in protest of American involvement in the Vietnam War. In it, Levertov imagines a future in which the Vietnamese people and their culture have been more or less wiped out by the war. The poem takes the form of a conversation of sorts, with one speaker asking questions about Vietnamese people and culture and another offering only inconclusive answers that highlight the horror of the conflict. "What Were They Like" ultimately underscores the inhumanity of war, exploring the ways it harms innocent civilians and suggesting the incalculable loss of eradicating an entire people.
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“What Were They Like?” Summary
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1) Did the Vietnamese people use stone lanterns?
2) Did they have formal rituals to express their deep respect for the blossoming of flowers?
3) Was their laughter generally quiet?
4) Did they use bone, animal tusks, jade, and silver to make jewelry and decorative objects?
5) Did they have a long narrative poem about a legendary or historical hero?
6) Could they tell the difference between talking and singing?1) Sir, their carefree hearts became heavy like stone. No one remembers if they had stone lanterns to light the lovely paths through their gardens.
2) Maybe they used to come together to celebrate spring, but once their children were killed there was no more growth, no new beginnings to celebrate.
3) Sir, laughter is painful to those who are suffering.
4) In another world, maybe they did. But making beautiful objects is something happy people do, and all of their bones were burnt.
5) No one remembers if they had such a poem. You have to keep in mind that most of these people were poor farmers; they lived their lives in the rice and bamboo fields. When calm clouds could be seen reflected in the water of the rice fields, and the water buffalo walked confidently along the flat steps in the sloping hills, maybe fathers recited old stories to their sons. But when bombs exploded in the fields, they only had time to scream.
6) There is still an echo of the song-like way they spoke. Someone once said their singing was like moths flying in moonlight. But who knows? They can't be heard anymore.
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“What Were They Like?” Themes
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The Unknowable Losses of Genocide
Levertov’s poem imagines a future in which the Vietnamese people and their culture have been essentially wiped out by the Vietnam War. In this future, two people are having a conversation: one asks questions about what the people of Vietnam were like, yet the other is unable to answer with anything more than supposition. This second voice draws a picture of what might have been lost in the conflict, while admitting there is no way to be sure. By juxtaposing historical inquiry with responses that resist closure and certainty, “What Were They Like” emphasizes just how unknowable the losses of wartime devastation and cultural destruction really are.
The poem opens with a series of questions implying that “the people of Viet Nam” no longer exist. It isn’t until the second stanza that the reader receives context as to why this is the case: they were wiped out by war, and more specifically, bombs.
This draws attention to the scale of the killing. The fact that the poem is titled “What Were They Like” evidences that the poem is tackling not just war, but genocide—the deliberate killing of an entire people. The evidence of genocide is present in the poem’s description of who was killed—not only soldiers, but also “peasants” and “their children.” The image of the “peaceful paddies” being “smashed” by bombs illustrates that genocide has no limits: it wipes out entire peoples, entire ways of life.
The questions that open the poem are posed by a different speaker than the one who describes the war. This first speaker can be assumed to be a historian or anthropologist, someone who wants to be able to characterize what the Vietnamese people were like, and what was lost with them—their ways of life, their customs and art. His questions are specific: did the people of Viet Nam have an epic poem or use bone, ivory, jade, or silver to make decorative objects?
While the speaker of the first stanza of the poem is looking for answers to specific questions—that is, for knowledge—the speaker of the second stanza resists this kind of certainty. They respond to the questions in ways that refuse closure; they offer possibilities while also acknowledging the fact that it is impossible for anyone to know for sure what was lost in the genocide of the Vietnamese people.
This second speaker begins or ends answers with “perhaps” or “it is not remembered.” This speaker is trying to illustrate what life could have been like for the Vietnamese people while also admitting to the incompleteness of any knowledge they could ever have regarding a people who were entirely wiped out.
In this way, the poem argues that history can never approximate what is lost in the event of such a devastating war; these losses are incomprehensible. The only people who could say for sure no longer exist. Any “knowledge” is suspect because it is at best incomplete, at worst mere supposition. All such knowledge only underlines how much remains unknown—and the unknowable nature of what was lost.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-31
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The Human Cost of War
The poem draws attention to the suffering of civilians—ordinary, everyday people whose lives were “in rice and bamboo”—as a reminder that the people often most affected by war are not the ones who actually wage it. The war’s victims, the poem argues, were largely innocent people who had nothing to do with the fighting, and were fundamentally just like anyone else: human beings trying to go about their lives. In highlighting the fundamental humanity of the Vietnamese people, the poem asks the reader to acknowledge the unjust inhumanity of war.
While there is a somewhat patronizing quality to the questions posed by the first speaker, the speaker of the second part of the poem portrays the “peasants” affected by the war in ways that emphasize their humanity. The first speaker wants to characterize the Vietnamese people according to whether they had “an epic poem”—perhaps something like The Odyssey—or whether they “could distinguish between speech and singing.” These questions seem to imply a Western standard against which the Vietnamese people, who in the world of the poem have been wiped out by war, are being measured. The first speaker implies a fundamental distance between Westerners and the Vietnamese people.
Rather than responding “yes” or “no” and thereby validating the implications of the first speaker’s questions, the second speaker answers in a way that draws attention not to the differences between the people killed in the Vietnam War and the people wondering about them later, but to their similarities—that is, to their essential humanity.
The speaker of the second stanza paints a picture of a father and son in the rice fields, the father telling the son “old tales.” This image suggests that it doesn’t really matter whether the people of Vietnam had “an epic poem”—in one form or another, they shared a fundamental human desire to pass stories from generation to generation. Whatever it looked like, it mattered. However they expressed their humanity, their humanity isn’t up for debate.
Likewise, rather than assenting to the first speaker’s question about whether the Vietnamese people could “distinguish between speech and singing,” the second speaker instead draws attention to the ephemeral quality of their expression, saying, “It was reported their singing resembled / the flight of moths in moonlight.” This image assigns beauty and value to their expression, again drawing attention to what really matters: not that their modes of expression are different from those wondering about them later, but that this expression, whatever it looked like, existed at all.
By drawing attention to the people at the center of the first speaker’s questions, the second speaker reminds the reader of the true devastation of war: not just the loss of knowledge around an extinct culture, but the loss of the actual human beings to which that culture belonged. By juxtaposing beautiful yet ordinary life with the devastation of bombs and the silence that follows, the poem reminds the reader of what is truly lost in war.
Furthermore, by juxtaposing two different ways of talking about what was lost, the poem emphasizes that it matters that people see and think of other human beings as fundamentally similar to themselves. It is in choosing not to see someone else’s humanity that humanity is lost: not just in terms of the people who are killed but also in terms of the people doing the killing.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-31
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “What Were They Like?”
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Lines 1-4
1) Did the ...
... opening of buds?"What Were They Like" begins with a series of questions about "the people of Viet Nam." The nature of the questions, along with their formality, imply that the poem's first speaker is likely a historian or an anthropologist, someone who is trying to understand a culture that no longer exists. This, combined with the title, provides some context for the poem. In the world of the poem, the Vietnamese people and their culture have been wiped out, and now someone, most likely a historian, is trying to understand what they were like.
In the first question, the enjambment after "Did the people of Viet Nam" draws attention to what's missing in the world of the poem: the Vietnamese people themselves. Note that the movement of the question across the line break is from general ("Did the people of Viet Nam") to specific ("use lanterns of stone?"). There is a sense of the speaker trying to understand an entire people based on a single detail. It is implied that knowing whether the Vietnamese people used stone lanterns will tell this person something important about their way of life.
The syntax (the arrangement of words) in the second line places an emphasis on the word "stone" because it falls at the end of the line (a more casual syntax might have been "use stone lanterns," in which case the emphasis would have fallen on the word "lantern"). By emphasizing the word "stone," Levertov allows for certain connotations to enter the poem: one might think of the "Stone Age" and the notion of "primitive" peoples and tools.
The second question is structured similarly; it again moves from general to specific across the line break—"Did they hold ceremonies" being general, "to reverence the opening of buds" being specific. "Buds" refers to the early form of flowers. Basically, the speaker is asking if the Vietnamese people had some sort of cultural or religious ceremonies to mark the start of spring.
The questions are seeking information, but there is also a sense of othering already happening in these opening lines. The question of "what were they like" followed by these particular questions—did they use stone lanterns, did they celebrate "the opening of buds"—implies another question, one that is more telling: how were they different from the people represented by the speaker?
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Lines 5-7
3) Were they inclined ...
... silver, for ornament? -
Lines 8-9
5) Had they an ...
... speech and singing? -
Line 10
1) Sir, their light ... turned to stone.
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Lines 11-12
It is not ...
... lanterns illumined pleasant ways. -
Lines 13-15
2) Perhaps they ...
... no more buds. -
Lines 16-18
3) Sir, laughter ...
... bones were charred. -
Lines 19-21
5) It is ...
... rice and bamboo. -
Lines 22-24
When peaceful clouds ...
... sons old tales. -
Lines 25-28
When bombs smashed ...
... like a song. -
Lines 29-31
It was reported ...
... is silent now.
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“What Were They Like?” Symbols
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Buds
Buds (the early stages of a flower) in this poem symbolize hope, new growth, and promise. The absence of buds, in turn, reflects the futures stolen from the Vietnamese people.
Early in the poem, the first speaker asks if "the people of Viet Nam" held ceremonies to show their respect and awe for "the opening of buds." The speaker is asking about a ceremony that likely represents a celebration of springtime, of the cycle of renewal inherent in the changing seasons. Yet later in the poem, the second speaker claims that after the Vietnamese children were killed, "there were no more buds." In other words, for the Vietnamese people who survived the bombings, there was no longer any point in celebrating the renewal of life. There were no more new beginnings; without their children, they had no hope.
This speaks to the magnitude and desolation of war and of genocide, as bombs do not discriminate between soldiers and civilians. By appealing to a natural sense of order—the idea of flowers growing and replenishing themselves—the poem makes plain the argument that cruelty of such magnitude is unnatural, and that the consequences are beyond understanding.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 3-4: “Did they hold ceremonies / to reverence the opening of buds?”
- Lines 13-15: “Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom, / but after their children were killed / there were no more buds.”
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“What Were They Like?” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Anaphora
Levertov uses anaphora throughout the first stanza of the poem as the speaker repeatedly asks questions about "the people of Viet Nam" using some variation of the phrase "Did they."
"Did" is a question word that implies a yes or no answer. While the title ("What Were They Like") is a broad question that could be answered in any number of ways, the speaker's questions are narrow, almost implying the answer for which he is looking.
The repeated use of the past tense also helps to immediately establish the premise of the poem: that the people being referred to by the speaker no longer exist. In addition to anaphora, Levertov uses parallelism to vary the language (using "Were" and "Had" in lines 5 and 8, but keeping the grammatical structure of a question word followed by "they"). The somewhat varied language feels more natural than if she were to have used the same phrase every time, while still maintaining the structure of a narrow, yes/no question.
The anaphora also helps make it very obvious that the first stanza is delivered by a different speaker than the second stanza. Even though it is the first speaker who is asking questions and the second speaker who is answering them, the specificity and narrowness of the questions make them feel more like answers than the second speaker's answers, which feel more open to uncertainty, and therefore more like questions. The anaphora seems to hint at a rigidity, a specific way of thinking about things that the second speaker goes on to undermine or reject.
Where anaphora appears in the poem:- Line 1: “Did the people”
- Line 3: “ Did they”
- Line 5: “Were they”
- Line 6: “Did they”
- Line 8: “Had they”
- Line 9: “Did they”
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Alliteration
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Consonance
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Sibilance
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Anadiplosis
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Euphony
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Caesura
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Juxtaposition
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Imagery
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Rhetorical Question
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"What Were They Like?" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Reverence
- Inclined
- Ornament
- Epic poem
- Distinguish
- Illumined
- Paddies
- Terraces
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(Location in poem: Line 4: “to reverence the opening of buds”)
To show deep regard or respect for something.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “What Were They Like?”
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Form
"What Were They Like" doesn't follow any sort of fixed poetic form. Instead, it creates its own unique form through the dialogue between the two speakers. The poem consists of 31 lines broken up into two stanzas:
- The first stanza corresponds with the first speaker, who is asking questions about what "the people of Viet Nam" were like before the war.
- The second, much longer stanza corresponds with the second speaker, who is attempting to answer these questions but who is also ultimately trying to gesture toward the fact that these questions can't really be answered.
The stanzas both make use of numbers as well—each question in the first stanza has a number, which corresponds to a numbered answer in the second stanza. For example, the first stanza opens with:
1) Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?The second stanza responds to this with:
1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.The numbers add structure to the poem and help make it clear that the second stanza is a direct reaction to the first. Also notice how the answers in the second stanza are always longer than the corresponding questions in the first—suggesting that the questions themselves are too simple and shallow, and that they cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." The answers are deliberately less clear-cut, less narrow than the questions. With the Vietnamese people themselves gone in the world of the poem, all the second speaker can do now is speculate.
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Meter
"What Were They Like" is written in free verse, and as such, does not use any kind of consistent meter or rhyme. The line lengths vary considerably, and generally lend themselves to the kind of dialogue which is portrayed in the poem—not exactly casual, but familiar enough to resemble the way people talk in real life.
As a poem that is confronting the horrors of war, and which is earnestly trying to raise awareness about and protest a specific war, it makes sense that it evades the music and order of strictly metered poetry. At the time this was written, U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was highly controversial; a large segment of the population vehemently opposed being involved. Everything about this poem asks to be taken seriously. Where meter might have introduced an element of musical pleasure or a feeling of order, this poem eschews those gestures toward wholeness. It is imagining a bleak future, and part of that bleak vision is evoked through a lack of playfulness.
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Rhyme Scheme
"What Were They Like" doesn't adhere to a set rhyme scheme, nor does it utilize rhyme outside a set pattern. The lack of rhyme is a huge part of the poem's directness. If not for the line breaks and stanzas, one could almost believe it is a transcription of an actual conversation between two people.
There is a straight-forward, accessible quality to the poem that is in part due to the lack of rhyme, meter, and other formal constraints, as well as the simplicity of the language itself. This is fitting for the type of poem this is, and in fact for the kind of poetry Levertov was writing at this time in general: poetry that was concerned with activism. The poem has a clear message to it; it is asking its readers to care about the damages of war, and to speak out against it. It was written for a specific moment, in protest of the Vietnam War, and so it needed to be accessible and digestible in order for people to know what to do with it.
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“What Were They Like?” Speaker
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"What Were They Like" is a conversation between two people, and as such, the poem has two distinct speakers. The speaker of the first stanza is someone who is trying to characterize "the people of Viet Nam" after they have been killed and their culture no longer exists. This speaker, whom the second speaker addresses as "Sir," seems to be someone interested in what the Vietnamese people were like from a historical or anthropological perspective. He asks a series of questions that seem to have the purpose of distinguishing the Vietnamese culture from other cultures.
The speaker of the second stanza feels much more invested in the shared humanity of the Vietnamese people, and is therefore much too moved by the loss of these people to be able to engage with the first man's questions in the way he wants to be engaged. The second speaker has a somewhat more poetic way of speaking about what happened, suggesting that the language of historical inquiry isn't suited to the magnitude of what was lost—that in fact the first speaker may be asking the wrong questions altogether.
This second speaker wants instead to acknowledge the gap left in the world where the Vietnamese people used to be, perhaps implying that not only are there no certain answers for this man's questions, but that violence itself resists logic: how can they ever answer for the crimes committed by their country, for the damages of genocide?
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“What Were They Like?” Setting
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The poem takes place in an imagined future. In this future, two people discuss what the Vietnamese people, who were wiped out by the Vietnam War, were like. The poem does not have an explicit physical location, but one might infer, based on when and where Levertov was writing, that it takes place in a post-war United States.
Much of the second stanza evokes a Vietnam that exists inside the speaker's imagination. This speaker admits that there is no way to know for sure what the Vietnamese people were like now that they're gone. So when this speaker describes scenes of gardens and rice fields and water buffalos, they are describing not an actual place but the closest approximation of a place that they are able to create with what information they have: they know only that these people were mostly peasants. They are trying to illustrate that anything they are able to say about the Vietnamese people and their culture at this point will be incomplete and subject to interpretation; there is simply no way for them to know.
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Literary and Historical Context of “What Were They Like?”
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Literary Context
Born in Ilford, a town in Essex, England, in 1923, Denise Levertov moved to the United States with her husband, American writer Mitchell Goodman, in 1948. There, she quickly established herself as a well-known and greatly respected American poet.
Though she was from England, Levertov's influences were largely American: this can be seen in her preference for everyday, unadorned, concrete language and straight-forward images. Levertov was also influenced by and later associated with, to some degree, the Black Mountain poets. This was a group of postmodern, progressive poets indebted to the poetics of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. They rejected traditional, "received" forms of poetry in favor of ones that focused on natural rhythms of breathing and emphasized the quotidian aspects of life.
Yet Levertov is also known to have refused labels, and was indeed well-respected for the individuality of her poetic voice. Over the course of her life she wrote increasingly from a place of personal pain and responsibility. Her poetry reflects her political values, and she used her influence to help promote other activist and feminist work. Levertov devoted much of her time to anti-war efforts, joining the War Resisters League and then later helping to found RESIST, a non-profit, anti-war collective.
Historical Context
Conflict between North and South Vietnam had been going on for several decades before the official start of the Vietnam War and the beginning of the U.S.'s involvement, which happened in 1954. However, it wasn't until March, 1965 that President Lyndon B. Johnson sent U.S. troops overseas in support of South Vietnam.
While many Americans supported this at this time, public opinion quickly began to change and opposition to the war grew steadily more heated as it became unclear whether the war could be won and the costs of staying involved. It is during this time that Levertov wrote "What Were They Like," which argues for the inhumanity of the war, especially regarding its impacts on civilian life, as over half the total number of people killed in the war were Vietnamese civilians. At the time of the poem's publication, it was unclear how long the war would last and what its outcome would be. Poets and activists such as Levertov helped change the tide of public opinion, but the war would drag on for another eight years.
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More “What Were They Like?” Resources
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External Resources
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War Resisters League — The website for the War Resisters League, of which Levertov was a member.
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Black Mountain School — An introduction to the Black Mountain poets, who were a significant influence on Levertov's work.
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An Overview of the Vietnam War — A fairly in-depth overview of the Vietnam War, including a timeline.
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The Poem Out Loud — A reading of the poem from Literature Today UK.
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Leverton's Biography — Read more about the poet and her work at the Ppoetry Foundation.
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Vietnam War Poetry — A collection of other poems written in response to the Vietnam War.
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