Philip Levine’s “Milkweed”
I first read Philip Levine in a poetry writing class taught by Charles Vandersee at the University of Virginia. Professor Vandersee assigned a bouquet of books by contemporary poets, including Levine’s 7 Years from Somewhere, Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich, The House on Marshland by Louise Glück, and Field Guide by Robert Hass—all marvelous and enduring volumes. Sometimes, a poem from one of them crests like a wave in my mind, and I pull the book from the shelf and slide back into that particular sea.
Levine’s “Milkweed” has been in my thoughts lately. When I found it in my copy of 7 Years from Somewhere, I saw again my long-ago pencil marks of appreciation—a plus sign here, a vertical line there. I hadn’t tried to explain the poem to myself in the margins. I’d just admired it and left it at that. But now I want to go beyond the plus signs and figure out why “Milkweed” has stayed with me for so long.
Here is how it begins:
Remember how unimportant
they seemed, growing loosely
in the open fields we crossed
on the way to school. We
would carve wooden swords
and slash at the luscious trunks
until the white milk started
and then flowed.
We are invited to remember a wildflower that we don't necessarily recall from our own childhoods. Yet as the poem unfolds, we slip back in time with the speaker as he describes his rambling walk to school. (Levine was from Detroit, so his walk may have been through weedy urban lots—or it may be entirely imagined.) The “luscious trunks” and “the white milk” are sensuous; the slashing of the plants with play swords, casually violent. This is the landscape the speaker and his schoolmates inhabit—a ripe, unruly place where they are briefly free to do as they please before their school day begins.
Once at school, the poet describes feeling trapped, force-fed the stupefying “History of History” while “the clock slowly paid / out the moments.” Time ticks by in a blur of rain, darkness, and snow seen from the windows,
and then the days,
then the years ran together and not
one mattered more than
another, and not one mattered.
Is this bleak? It sure is, yet the rhythm and repetition of Levine’s language, along with the images of the natural world, hint at something else, something more. Maybe there are secret seeds of meaning buried inside those dreary years and days.
The second and final stanza of “Milkweed” shifts to the present, as the poet takes a walk in “the empty woods, bent over, / crunching through oak leaves, / asking myself questions / without answers.” His frustration is palpable, but again, there is more. “From somewhere,” the speaker concludes,
a froth of seeds drifted by touched
with gold in the last light
of a lost day, going with
the wind as they always did.
This gorgeous, lingering image cannot be easily paraphrased. I’m left to ponder my own “questions without answers,” but my state of uncertainty is enriching rather than enervating. There is something movingly elegiac in these lines. Maybe it’s the implied awareness that impermanence and continuity can and do coexist. Maybe it’s the sense that possibilities are always floating in and out of our peripheral vision, whether we take them in or not.
However, it leaves me wondering. I ask, what have I overlooked in my own life? What lovely, ephemeral things—dew on the late-summer grass, the tinkling bell of a small child’s laugh—have I acknowledged but not absorbed into my breath and stride? And how is it that a sudden, visceral memory of childhood can make one feel simultaneously young again and bone-rattlingly old?
In the conclusion, I’m struck by Levine’s skillful deployment of alliteration (“gold” and “going,” “last light” and “lost,” “with” and “wind”). Alliteration is a form of rhyme, and here, it adds to the subtle music of those last lines.
The enjambment in the second stanza is also noteworthy. Without punctuation stopping us at the ends of lines, the evolving image floats down the page, just like the seedpods themselves, and then comes to a full stop. We might wonder whether the poet has gleaned any insight from this small scene pulling him back to his childhood memory. The feeling I come away with is one of quiet astonishment—the world contains so much that is stunning, yet barely acknowledged. Trapped inside our own heads, we root around for serviceable answers to a lifetime of questions. It’s as if they formed a vast trove of mismatched socks, each one with a mate we can never find.
The poem’s seedpods will land somewhere, just as they came from somewhere, and some of them, if not all, will take root and grow. Despite the first stanza’s depiction of time wasted in meaningless pursuits, there is a glimmer of recognition in the poem’s final moment of beholding.
If only we could touch that froth of seeds and go with the wind. But hey, let’s not rush it.