Overland to the Islands

Denise Levertov seems to have missed the post-modern poetry bus in her poem “Overland to the Islands”. The poem gives a narrative account of the travels of a black dog. She gives vivid descriptions of the dog itself throughout the poem. It is easy to dismiss this poem and perhaps Levertov’s poetry in general when one considers this break from post-modernism. We see Levertov’s organic form in her poetry, which is perhaps what brings this narrative back to post-modernism. Her poetics is seen in the “nonaural rhyme” of the poem, and the account of the natural chaos of a moment.
An obvious rhyming image is that of the dog, which is most notably seen in the repetition of the word dog. She returns to the image of the dog itself as seen from a different perspective. If she is returning from a perspective we must ask ourselves from whence she has returned. It is from the perspective of the dog which she has returned. She shifts, though slightly, not as drastically as other poets have done, from the perspective of “let’s go,” including herself and the reader in the movement of the dog, to an outward observatory perspective. This new perspective is seen when she begins to describe the dog itself instead of the us whose movement has been suggested at the beginning of the poem. From here she shifts back to the person in movement when she writes, “and that too / is as one would desire.” The “one” is not the perspective of the dog, but of the person in movement. From there she switches back to the perspective of an observation of the ground under the dog’s feet and his engagement with the world around him. She ends the poem from the perspective of observation.