“What Were They Like?” is an anti-war poem by the English-American poet Denise Levertov. The poem takes place in a hypothetical future in which the Vietnamese people have been completely wiped out during the US military's war in their country. The poem is written in the past tense in order to emphasize the finality of war: once a civilization has been destroyed, it is gone forever. The poem humanizes the Vietnamese people to show that they are just like anyone else. For example, they love their children, sing when they are happy, decorate their bodies and their homes, and work to produce their food. In this way, though the poem takes place in the future, it implicitly urges readers to stop the war now so that the future it describes will not come to pass.
The poem is split into two stanzas. In the first stanza, an unnamed person (the questioner) asks six questions about the Vietnamese people: what tools they used, their ceremonies, whether they laughed, if they used things like ivory as ornaments, if they had an epic poem, and if they distinguished between talking and singing. The first stanza is split up by numbered questions and the language is clear and simple. It is as if the questioner is reading from a list or questionnaire.
In the second stanza, the responder answers these questions in the same numbered order. The answers are longer and more poetic than the questions. They implicitly show that the questions are somewhat absurd. Why would a community laugh or decorate their bodies with ivory if their villages are being bombed or their children killed? The responder also repeatedly emphasizes how difficult it is to answer the speaker’s questions about Vietnamese culture because this culture no longer exists: it has been wiped out. For example, the responder says “It was reported that their singing resembled/the flight of moths in moonlight./Who can say? It is silent now.” Lines like this show how difficult it is to retrieve information about a lost civilization. The poem mourns the destruction of this civilization by describing the silence as the only thing left from the war.
