The Pilot By Denise Levertov Summary

The Vietnam War was between North and South Vietnam, and their allies like America. The Americans goal was to prevent communist insurgency. Eventually “…Henry Kissinger and Nixon made a policy called ‘Vietnamization’” (History.com). The policy entails “American troops [to] be withdrawn while South Vietnamese soldiers [would be] backed by continued American bombing…” (Foner 1016). There were antiwar movements that “spread on colleges demonstrating [how it has] spread…” (Foner 1016). Soon “the government of South Vietnam collapsed; the [U.S didn’t] intervene except to evacuate the Americans…” (Foner 1017). There were criticisms of the U.S in the war. One of them is the poem The Pilot, by Denise Levertov showing the literary perspective of the Vietnam War in which the narrator 's point of view is antiwar and it criticizes the American involvement in the

A character “Mrs. Brown, the mother of one of [the] prisoner, and loved her, for she has the same loving kindness in her that I saw in Vietnamese women” who the narrator likes because she represents the suffering of the Vietnamese (Levertov). She doesn’t understand how a woman who is so kind could be the mother of a son who is a pilot bomber. The narrator is antiwar and criticizes the bomber 's because they are fighting a war that hurts people back home and in Vietnam. She represents the suffering of Vietnamese, but also Americans because she is a mom of POW. Which meant she had a part in making them into bombers and that’s why the narrator can’t “meet the eyes of Mrs. Brown” (Levertov). This reveals that POW in the Vietnam War was nurtured to be inhuman. Another example of the author anger against the war is when she says “I hope their chances in life up to this point have been poor” (Levertov). The author assumes that the lives of this bomber are horrible and that they never had a successful in life at home. The author is against the war and it is present in the poem as her purpose to questions the POW