Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?
Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after the children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.
in this poem it is divid into two section answers and questions , in this it is trying to say that there are two people one asking the questions and the other be the know it all giving te answers, this poem is writen in pseudo-journalistic technique. the message that the poem is trying to give to the reader that is that war only causes death and distruction and there is no winer in a war .
in line 27 it says there is an echo this means that war will always existand that war will never end also the poem is based on facts on the on the war.
just to let you know i am studying this in high school and to get the understanding of what this poem is trying to get is quit simpy.
I am doing this poem at the minute in English Anthology for GCSE, i’m sort of understanding it…but i’m still confused…lol
This poem shows the reality of what happens in war.. the loss of lives show exactally why people get agitated by it. The most effective line for me is the one that says ‘Who knows? Its silent now’ to me this indicates that an entire country was wiped out. Although we all know this was not the case but still many many thousands of lives were lost… its not fair and is a very delicate subject for many who have lost loved ones due to war… more people need to respect that rather than post unappropriate comments about it. This world would be a much better place if people thought about what they were saying before they say it…
This poem was written during US involvement in Vietnam as a protest against that involvement. It is despiaring, as though the questions are being asked about a people that no longer exists.
Is it only about Vietnam? No: it is about war, not about a particular place, and the results of war. And as it shouws, no one is invulnerable or immune from those results.
this poem is a peaceful and delightful poem to read
this poem is wow a waste of time. dont read it, its pointless and boring….it makes no sense & we don’t live in vietnam so bovvered?!? we iz wow carin bwt the war & dat buh really??? is the war our folt thow? nah m8. inabit x
“It is silent now” could be that no voices are now heard as they were killed during the war.
we are doing this poem in Engish
Please be aware that the poem as printed above contains errors. Example: it is “after the children were killed,” not “after THEIR children,” and “stone lanterns illumined,” not “stone GARDENS.” There are other errors as well.
This poem has been set to music by James Primosch. Our choir, Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, commissioned Mr. Primosch’s setting and has performed it twice in concerts. It is a wonderful and sympathetic setting of the text. Our site: http://www.mcchorus.org.
I personally love this poem. Me myself, I sort of see it as some kind of interrogation.
“Did the people of vietnam use lanterns of stone?
Sir, their kind hearts turned to stone”
We used levels to establish the context…who would you call ‘sir’, then we studied other aspects of levels, had a few experiments, roleplays, scenes, still images. But all based on the poem.
Our group formed our piece on a kinda police interrogation and said the poem as a police interrogation. It sounds amazing in that context.
If you investigate the poem in different ways, you really do get a real sense of what the poems about and how it’s set to create a real dismal feeling.
I love this poem and most of our drama class did too, legendary
I feel that this poem expresses how the people of vietnamese lives chnaged so dramatically after the war and i feel that its a very good poem.
I thought this poem was written very well and adds the reader sympathy and leaves them in the setting of the poem. Beautiful poem!
Its a very weird poem…I had to do study it for my English class and I hated it…It’s just so..BAD…
this poem is very poor and pathetic, totally pathetic
shouldn’t it have numbers, so each question is matched with it’s respective answer. That’s how it is in the UK GCSE Anthology (a set of poems that we have to study!)
i personally believe that Levertov’s Poem WWTL? is structured in this way of a particular reason. i believe that the questions that she poses in the first half of the poem seem to be almost from a child or someone who genuinely wnats to know about what the vietnamese civilisation were like, and in the second half of the poem the questions are answered with the irony that they all relate to what happened during the war, as with most ‘war-time’ poetry, the writer wisher to show her audience what happened to the people, and the brutality of the americans that they were faced with.
the last line of this poem is incredibly poignant and thought-provoking. it is also very inventive that she has answered the question in the first stanza, and at the same time make a very true statement to show that no-onw will ever know whether the people of Viet Nam’sspeech was like a song.
what? you pack the fudge for bread?
i have just been studying this poem for my english class and i was wondering why Levertov put the poems into questions and answers.
frances xx (all the way from england!!!!!)
If this poem is treated as a live interview, it will
gain immeasurably in power and effect. A student once
suggested this in class. We then tried it that way, antiphonally, in class, and its impact was like a quiet explosion in the room….As a poem, it answers all questions, hits the head and heart with its impact, when treated that way.
(I feel quite uneasy about the accuracy of the poem’s
“lower section” as printed. I think someone should
make sure it agrees with the original. Especially in the answers to the first and fifth questions.)
I love this poem, especially for its irony.
I personally believe that Levertov put all the questions first and then the answers because by the time the reader gets to the answers he has probably already forgotten the questions. This emphasizes the idea she is portraying about how quickly people forget.