Denise Levertov's 'The Wedding Ring'

“The Wedding Ring” by Denise Levertov is about the speaker in the poem coming across a wedding ring that had been stored away, and remembering the failed marriage attached to the ring. In the first line “My wedding ring lies in a basket as if at the bottom of a well.” The wedding ring itself being a symbol of marriage and the word bottom brings ideas of the dark taps and loneliness. A person feels when they are at the bottom, emotionally speaking. The next line “Nothing will come to fish it back up and onto my finger again.” this is meaning there isn’t anything that is going to be able to bring back the failed marriage. The wedding ring being in the basket is a symbol of a marriage that ended a long time ago. The basket being the opposite of
In the lines “Is a kind of keeping the body does, expelling foreign material, sometimes years after injury.” The speaker describes a process the body does of bringing foreign objects embedded in the body to the surface in order to expel them. As the poem continues you can see how this is not only true for physical things in the body but mental and emotional debris as well. Has the doctor removes different materials from the incision the afternoon of the original event is reconstructed in the speaker’s mind. The hunting emotions of the day. Still trapped in his/her mind is evident in the lines “And if he were to listen intently, he might hear the rough and larynx of this woman calling up through the long cords of flesh, saying Allah al Akbar, before releasing her body’s weapon.” The poem is a clear illustration of how soldiers have and scars not visible on their bodies, but in their minds, these emotional scars not being as easily fixed as the physical ones. This can be seen towards the end of the poem in the lines “her dark and lasting gift for this jundee Ameriki, who carries fragments of the war inscribed in scar tissue, a deep, intractable