Celebration of Acceptance

Denise Levertov’s “Stepping Westward” is a poem that celebrates life in whatever form it is found. With the echo of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” reverberating in the first line and the parallel conditional propositions that organize the poem, the speaker sings of flexibility, stability, and durability. These seem to function as requisites for stepping in to the next phase of any pilgrimage. To journey in the fullest sense is to accept who one is and what one’s life is like.

The title suggests the sense of adventure, of passage, that the speaker is embarking upon. The present tense gives the poem a sense of immediacy and power. The movement westward in American literature has always suggested rebirth, the fresh start, fueled by the image of early trappers, gold-rushers, and homesteaders. The suggestion of the title is revisited in the last line with the speaker’s assurance that she can eat as she goes. “Step” and go are the metaphors for acceptance of what is.

The initial lines introduce a declaration that establishes the major image of the poem—the “muscadine.” Using the stereotypical notion of “green” as uninitiated, innocent, and youthful, the speaker freshens the image with its completing qualifier: “What is green in me darkens.” The adverb “what” indicates an approximation of that which is green, that part that is darkening or ripening. The central image, the “muscadine,” represents the aging, the experienced life and initiates a sacramental sense with its suggestion of wine.

The poem is organized around three conditional statements, each beginning with the conjunction “if.” In the first two conditional statements, the speaker moves from the general to the specific, from the impersonal to the personal. These statements introduce polar opposite conditions and call both conditions “good.” There is the ring of Genesis and the creation myth just under the surface of this construction.

In the first of the conditional statements the rendering of “good” heightens the irony of the statement that reverses the conventional wisdom of constancy. The speaker embraces the “inconstant,” acknowledging faithfulness to “ebb and flow” and returns to the figure of the muscadine. The cyclical nature of the tides, the moon, and seasons of growth are acknowledged as the speaker asserts that this is a “time of ripening.” The muscadine and the woman are one in the fall. Again, Genesis and the creation myth are called into the equation of inconstancy, and the darkening of the green of the first assertion takes on a post-Edenic character.

The second conditional statement reverses the first giving the contrasting option “to be true” and introduces a second metaphor, the north star. The north star, according to custom, guided those at sea who held steady to her course. By measuring the angle between the north star and the northern horizon, the early navigator could determine the latitude of his ship. The north star almost directly above the earth’s axis remains stationary while all other stars seem to revolve around the axis. When she is constant, the speaker is always there, either she holds “steady in the black sky” or she burns “in blue above quilts of cloud.” The speaker nods to the paradox of the north star, suggesting that it seems to vanish yet is always there above the clouds. The use of “burn” juxtaposed to “quilt of cloud” furthers this paradox suggesting the two poles of temperature.

The poem gains much of its tension through the exploration of polar opposites—inconstancy/steadiness, hot/cold, dark/light, green/ripe, night/day, sun/moon, sweet/salt. The latter is used as an emblem of comparison in the celebration of acceptance. The speaker insists that “ to be glad to be” woman is a taste greater than the dualities of “sweet” and “salt.” Again, the speaker moves from the impersonal to the personal. Using the relative pronouns “what” and “who,” she distances the generic woman and then the self. This distancing sets up the notion of “shadow” and “thread of wonder.” As “shadow” she lengthens “as the sun moves” westward in the completion of its cycle, a lengthening that is “drawn out on a thread of wonder” even as the sun is “drawn out on a thread of wonder.” The equation of woman and sun through the ambiguity of “thread of wonder” reinforces the sense of the sacramental in the poem as well as the integration of woman and earth or a bid to the solidity and completion of the concept of earth mother.

The third conditional statement is a statement of transubstantiation. The “burdens” that she might bear become “gifts, goods, a basket of bread.” Again, moving from the indefinite to the definite, the “bread” comes in duality. It is an agent of pain, but it brings a sweet closure. The sensuality of the poem with its emphasis on taste, sight, smell, and the kinesthetic celebrates the vitality of the woman’s life. The smell of pain produces an energy that makes the going possible.

There is an incarnational quality, perhaps a progressive incarnational quality, in the poem that is realized in the assertion of self as shadow. The shadow is subject to the movement of the sun on its westward path even as the speaker is subject to being part of the “thread of wonder.” The sense of shadow, the unnamed earthly presence of the divine, is an integral part of the journey realized in the title of the poem. Eating the bread, then, becomes the ritualized sacrament commemorating shadow, suffering, the gift of life.