The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov

The Third Dimension by Denise Levertov instantly drew me in with the structure of the poem, the punctuation, and most importantly my perceived interpretation. The structure progresses slowly, a little bit at a time, similar to the healing over time after “love cracked [you] open” (1488). During this healing you can take life only a little bit at a time, dealing with small doses of reality as they come. I’m not entirely sure what Levertov meant by each carefully placed colon, period, hyphen, etc. but I personally love punctuation and the way it can make or break a sentence, change the entire meaning of a passage, or cause the reader to overthink the meaning behind such placement (as I’m probably doing right now) and I feel like, with her attention to detail in the rest of the poem, she meant something by it. 

As far as the content of the poem goes, I think it perfectly, and yet vaguely, describes the period of healing after a break up, the loss of a loved one, or any such devastating event. The opening eight lines “who’d believe me if I said, ‘they took and split me open from scalp to crotch, and still I’m alive, and walk around pleased with the sun and all the world’s bounty’” (1488) seem to me to explain those moments during this time of healing when people ask the customary “how are you?” and since you know they either wouldn’t care to hear about your troubles or they wouldn’t believe that you were still functioning, you respond with the programmed “good”. Instead of confiding in your friends and family, you bury yourself deep in the third dimension where no one can see what’s really going on. And you fake a smile “here in the sweet sun” (1489), putting on a mask of “fiction, while [you] breath and change pace” (1489) and figure out how to reply with an honest “good” again.