The Widening Spell Of Leaves
Read 'The Widening Spell Of Leaves' by 'Larry Levis' and provide your summary and literary analysis in the comments section below.
The Widening Spell Of Leaves by Larry Levis
--The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968
--for my brother
Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill.
I was driving south toward a large city famous
For so little it had a replica, in concrete,
In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck
In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it.
But the city was hours away, beyond the hills
Shaped like the bodies of sleeping women.
Often I had to slow down for herds of goats
Or cattle milling on those narrow roads, & for
The narrower, lost, stone streets of villages
I passed through. The pains in my stomach had grown
Gradually sharper & more frequent as the day
Wore on, & now a fever had set up house.
In the villages there wasn't much point in asking
Anyone for help. In those places, where tanks
Were bivouacked in shade on their way back
From some routine exercise along
The Danube, even food was scarce that year.
And the languages shifted for no clear reason
From two hard quarries of Slavic into German,
Then to a shred of Latin spliced with oohs
And hisses. Even when I tried the simplest phrases,
The peasants passing over those uneven stones
Paused just long enough to look up once,
Uncomprehendingly. Then they turned
Quickly away, vanishing quietly into that
Moment, like bark chips whirled downriver.
It was autumn. Beyond each village the wind
Threw gusts of yellowing leaves across the road.
The goats I passed were thin, gray; their hind legs,
Caked with dried shit, seesawed along--
Not even mild contempt in their expressionless,
Pale eyes, & their brays like the scraping of metal.
Except for one village that had a kind
Of museum where I stopped to rest, & saw
A dead Scythian soldier under glass,
Turning to dust while holding a small sword
At attention forever, there wasn't much to look at.
Wind, leaves, goats, the higher passes
Locked in stone, the peasants with their fate
Embroidering a stillness into them,
And a spell over all things in that landscape,
Like . . .
That was the trouble; it couldn't be
Compared to anything else, not even the sleep
Of some asylum at a wood's edge with the sound
Of a pond's spillway beside it. But as each cramp
Grew worse & lasted longer than the one before,
It was hard to keep myself aloof from the threadbare
World walking on that road. After all,
Even as they moved, the peasants, the herds of goats
And cattle, the spiralling leaves, at least were part
Of that spell, that stillness.
After a while,
The villages grew even poorer, then thinned out,
Then vanished entirely. An hour later,
There were no longer even the goats, only wind,
Then more & more leaves blown over the road, sometimes
Covering it completely for a second.
And yet, except for a random oak or some brush
Writhing out of the ravine I drove beside,
The trees had thinned into rock, into large,
Tough blonde rosettes of fading pasture grass.
Then that gave out in a bare plateau. . . . And then,
Easing the Dacia down a winding grade
In second gear, rounding a long, funneled curve--
In a complete stillness of yellow leaves filling
A wide field--like something thoughtlessly,
Mistakenly erased, the road simply ended.
I stopped the car. There was no wind now.
I expected that, & though I was sick & lost,
I wasn't afraid. I should have been afraid.
To this day I don't know why I wasn't.
I could hear time cease, the field quietly widen.
I could feel the spreading stillness of the place
Moving like something I'd witnessed as a child,
Like the ancient, armored leisure of some reptile
Gliding, gray-yellow, into the slightly tepid,
Unidentical gray-brown stillness of the water--
Something blank & unresponsive in its tough,
Pimpled skin--seen only a moment, then unseen
As it submerged to rest on mud, or glided just
Beneath the lustreless, calm yellow leaves
That clustered along a log, or floated there
In broken ringlets, held by a gray froth
On the opaque, unbroken surface of the pond,
Which reflected nothing, no one.
And then I remembered.
When I was a child, our neighbors would disappear.
And there wasn't a pond of crocodiles at all.
And they hadn't moved. They couldn't move. They
Lived in the small, fenced-off backwater
Of a canal. I'd never seen them alive. They
Were in still photographs taken on the Ivory Coast.
I saw them only once in a studio when
I was a child in a city I once loved.
I was afraid until our neighbor, a photographer,
Explained it all to me, explained how far
Away they were, how harmless; how they were praised
In rituals as "powers." But they had no "powers,"
He said. The next week he vanished. I thought
Someone had cast a spell & that the crocodiles
Swam out of the pictures on the wall & grew
Silently & multiplied & then turned into
Shadows resting on the banks of lakes & streams
Or took the shapes of fallen logs in campgrounds
In the mountains. They ate our neighbor, Mr. Hirata.
They ate his whole family. That is what I believed,
Then. . .that someone had cast a spell. I did not
Know childhood was a spell, or that then there
Had been another spell, too quiet to hear,
Entering my city, entering the dust we ate. . . .
No one knew it then. No one could see it,
Though it spread through lawnless miles of housing tracts,
And the new, bare, treeless streets; it slipped
Into the vacant rows of warehouses & picked
The padlocked doors of working-class bars
And union halls & shuttered, empty diners.
And how it clung! (forever, if one had noticed)
To the brothel with the pastel tassels on the shade
Of an unlit table lamp. Farther in, it feasted
On the decaying light of failing shopping centers;
It spilled into the older, tree-lined neighborhoods,
Into warm houses, sealing itself into books
Of bedtime stories read each night by fathers--
The books lying open to the flat, neglected
Light of dawn; & it settled like dust on windowsills
Downtown, filling the smug cafés, schools,
Banks, offices, taverns, gymnasiums, hotels,
Newsstands, courtrooms, opium parlors, Basque
Restaurants, Armenian steam baths,
French bakeries, & two of the florists' shops--
Their plate glass windows smashed forever.
Finally it tried to infiltrate the exact
Center of my city, a small square bordered
With palm trees, olives, cypresses, a square
Where no one gathered, not even thieves or lovers.
It was a place which no longer had any purpose,
But held itself aloof, I thought, the way
A deaf aunt might, from opinions, styles, gossip.
I liked it there. It was completely lifeless,
Sad & clear in what seemed always a perfect,
Windless noon. I saw it first as a child,
Looking down at it from that as yet
Unvandalized, makeshift studio.
I remember leaning my right cheek against
A striped beach ball so that Mr. Hirata--
Who was Japanese, who would be sent the next week
To a place called Manzanar, a detention camp
Hidden in stunted pines almost above
The Sierra timberline--could take my picture.
I remember the way he lovingly relished
Each camera angle, the unwobbling tripod,
The way he checked each aperture against
The light meter, in love with all things
That were not accidental, & I remember
The care he took when focusing; how
He tried two different lens filters before
He found the one appropriate for that
Sensual, late, slow blush of afternoon
Falling through the one broad bay window.
I remember holding still & looking down
Into the square because he asked me to;
Because my mother & father had asked me please
To obey & be patient & allow the man--
Whose business was failing anyway by then--
To work as long as he wished to without any
Irritations or annoyances before
He would have to spend these years, my father said,
Far away, in snow, & without his cameras.
But Mr. Hirata did not work. He played.
His toys gleamed there. That much was clear to me . . . .
That was the day I decided I would never work.
It felt like a conversion. Play was sacred.
My father waited behind us on a sofa made
From car seats. One spring kept nosing through.
I remember the camera opening into the light . . . .
And I remember the dark after, the studio closed,
The cameras stolen, slivers of glass from the smashed
Bay window littering the unsanded floors,
And the square below it bathed in sunlight . . . . All this
Before Mr. Hirata died, months later,
From complications following pneumonia.
His death, a letter from a camp official said,
Was purely accidental. I didn't believe it.
Diseases were wise. Diseases, like the polio
My sister had endured, floating paralyzed
And strapped into her wheelchair all through
That war, seemed too precise. Like photographs . . .
Except disease left nothing. Disease was like
And equation that drank up light & never ended,
Not even in summer. Before my fever broke,
And the pains lessened, I could actually see
Myself, in the exact center of that square.
How still it had become in my absence, & how
Immaculate, windless, sunlit. I could see
The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree,
See it more clearly than ever, more clearly than
I had seen anything before in my whole life:
Against the modest, dark gray, solemn trunk,
The leaves were becoming only what they had to be--
Calm, yellow, things in themselves & nothing
More--& frankly they were nothing in themselves,
Nothing except their little reassurance
Of persisting for a few more days, or returning
The year after, & the year after that, & every
Year following--estranged from us by now--& clear,
So clear not one in a thousand trembled; hushed
And always coming back--steadfast, orderly,
Taciturn, oblivious--until the end of Time.
The Widening Spell Of Leaves Summary and Analysis
Larry Levis frames the poem as a long, pressured journey through the Carpathian frontier, where a sick traveler drives through villages, military outposts, and thinning roads while trying to reach a city that keeps receding. The physical crisis in the car becomes a way of seeing the landscape more sharply: goats, leaves, ruined places, and frozen museum relics all seem caught in a strange suspension, as if the world has entered a spell of waiting and disappearance. The journey moves from external disorientation to inward memory, and the poem gradually reveals that the roadside strangeness is linked to earlier forms of fear, loss, and historical violence.
The speaker is not only describing a foreign road trip; he is also reconstructing childhood scenes in which photography, disappearance, and wartime displacement shaped his understanding of reality. Images of a Japanese American neighbor, Manzanar, a failed business, and the childish belief that crocodiles or disease were agents of a hidden curse deepen the poem's central tension between innocence and knowledge. By the end, the widening field of leaves becomes both a literal autumn sight and a hard-earned vision of endurance: the natural world seems impersonal, almost indifferent, yet also beautifully persistent, returning year after year beyond human suffering. The poem's meaning gathers around that uneasy clarity, where beauty and loss cannot be separated.
Tone in The Widening Spell Of Leaves
Levis's tone is reflective, haunted, and at times gently ironical, especially when the poem notices the absurdity or strangeness of places and beliefs. Beneath that poised control, however, the emotional atmosphere is tense and melancholic: the reader feels illness, dislocation, and historical grief accumulating under the surface of the journey. The ending softens into a clearer, more meditative register, but the calm it reaches is uneasy rather than restful, shaped by the memory of what has vanished and what keeps returning.
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Themes in The Widening Spell Of Leaves
- Memory and recurrence - The poem returns repeatedly to childhood scenes and to the present drive, showing how earlier fears and impressions keep resurfacing in altered form. What the speaker sees on the road is inseparable from what he once believed as a child.
- Displacement and exile - Foreign roads, shifting languages, military camps, and vanished villages create a world in which people are constantly out of place. That outer dislocation mirrors the speaker's inner sense of being unmoored.
- Historical violence - The poem links personal memory to broader historical injustices, especially wartime detention and the quiet erasure of minority lives. The repeated disappearances are not just private losses but signs of a larger social order.
- Perception and the limits of understanding - The speaker keeps trying to compare and explain what he sees, but the landscape resists easy analogy. The poem values sharp observation while also admitting that some experiences remain opaque.
- Illness and bodily vulnerability - The fever and stomach pain make the speaker unusually receptive to the world around him, but they also remind readers that the body is fragile and subject to forces it cannot control.
- Art, photography, and stillness - Cameras, photographs, and the act of holding still suggest that art can preserve moments, yet it can also freeze people into silence or absence. The poem treats images as both revealing and haunting.
- Nature's indifference and endurance - Leaves, trees, wind, and seasonal change carry a sense of impersonal continuity. Nature does not console the speaker, but it does outlast human fear and loss.
Literary Devices in The Widening Spell Of Leaves
- Extended metaphor - The central idea of a spell runs through the poem, joining illness, memory, history, and autumn into one sustained pattern of enchantment and unsettlement.
- Imagery - The poem's concrete details-road dust, goats, leaves, studio light, smashed glass, a bare square-build a vivid world that makes the speaker's memories feel immediate and exact.
- Syntax and enjambment - Long, flowing sentences carry the reader through uncertainty the way the car moves through the landscape, creating momentum while also mimicking thought, recollection, and physical fatigue.
- Juxtaposition - The poem places pastoral scenery beside military camps, childhood innocence beside detention, and photography beside disappearance, sharpening the emotional and historical contrasts.
- Repetition - Recurrent words and motifs such as stillness, leaves, spell, and photograph give the poem a circular, haunted structure and reinforce the sense of returns.
- Simile - Comparisons such as the world moving like bark chips or the reptile gliding into water help make abstract feelings of estrangement and stillness tangible.
- Cataloging - The long lists of places, institutions, and objects create a crowded social world, then let that world feel as if it is being steadily emptied out.
- Paradox - The poem often pairs opposite ideas, such as clarity and emptiness or stillness and movement, to show how perception can become most intense when life feels most threatened.
Symbolism in The Widening Spell Of Leaves
- Leaves - The drifting leaves suggest autumn, time passing, and a quiet persistence that outlasts human turmoil. They also become a final image of estranged but recurring life.
- Road - The road represents a life path that is interrupted, uncertain, and sometimes erased altogether. Its disappearance near the end reflects the instability of memory and direction.
- Photographs - Photographs stand for preserved moments, but also for distance, artifice, and the uneasy power of images to outlive the people in them.
- Crocodiles - The crocodiles embody the child's fear that hidden danger can lie behind ordinary surfaces. They also symbolize how imagination turns absence into threat.
- The square in the city - The empty square functions as a place of suspension and inwardness, a space outside ordinary social use where the speaker confronts stillness and memory.
- Manzanar - The detention camp symbolizes state power, exile, and the forced removal of Japanese Americans, anchoring the poem's private memories in historical injustice.
- Goats - The thin, bedraggled goats suggest endurance under deprivation and the harshness of the landscape. Their presence also contributes to the poem's atmosphere of survival without comfort.
Historical Context of The Widening Spell Of Leaves
The poem moves through a European setting marked by the Cold War, borderlands, military presence, and the layered history of Central and Eastern Europe. Its references to shifting languages, ruined villages, and tanks on exercise place it in a region shaped by political division and older cultural crossings, which helps explain the poem's unstable sense of place and identity.
It also reaches into the history of the United States during World War II, especially the incarceration of Japanese Americans at camps such as Manzanar. By bringing that history into contact with childhood memory and photography, the poem reflects a broader late twentieth-century poetic concern with recovering suppressed histories, examining public violence, and testing how private consciousness carries the marks of national events.
Poems Similar to The Widening Spell Of Leaves
- The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
- North and South - Elizabeth Bishop
- The Afterlife - Billy Collins
- Directive - Robert Frost
- Musee des Beaux Arts - W. H. Auden