Say a word often enough and it stops meaning anything. Levertov's poem starts from that fear. "Biafra. Biafra. Biafra." sounds like a headline, a chant, or a speaker trying to remind herself why the word matters. The poem is about compassion fatigue. Photographs of suffering reach us faster than our feelings can respond, and the feelings wear out. The speaker has already spent her "small stock of compassion" on Vietnam, "trying / to act to end / that war." Now, faced with starving children in Biafra, she has nothing left to give.
The poem's most striking claim is that this exhaustion is a kind of poisoning. "The poisoning / called 'getting used to'" has "taken place," and the quotation marks around the phrase show how casually we excuse ourselves with it. The speaker then calls herself and her readers "the deads", an ungrammatical plural that turns a state into a category of person, as if numbness were a social class. Her images of decay are domestic and shabby. Leftover love "changes / to bile, brims, spills over: stain on the cushion." The catastrophe is placed in a comfortable living room, where the reader is sitting with the newspaper. The first part ends with the news that "doesn't even get in past our eyes." The body does not even register it.
The form acts out this breakdown. The poem is free verse with no rhyme. Its lines are short and chopped, and colons do the work of full stops, so that each thought lurches into the next without resolving. The first parenthesis, "(when we would let it by photos of napalmed children", never closes, and the sentence trails off as if it too had given out. Even the cold phrase "Dull / accumulation of overdue statistics" is broken across a line, so the word "Dull" sits alone and does what it describes.
The second section shifts from "we" to "I," from accusation to confession. The repeated name now carries commas rather than full stops and becomes a physical act: "hammering / the word against my breast." The gesture suggests both self-punishment and an attempt to break something open, to "make room for more knowledge / in my bonemarrow." Then television interrupts. The faces at a political convention are "coarse faces grinning, painted by Bosch." The reference to Humphrey's nomination suggests the late 1960s, and the comparison to Bosch turns the political spectacle into a vision of hell. Against that noise comes the sudden "flash" of a single photograph: "eyes in a skull, patient sadness." The word "patient" is the most disturbing in the poem, because it makes the child's dying calm and almost courteous. The parenthetical "(age 5?)" is just as unsettling. The question mark admits that nobody even knows how old he is.
The ending refuses to comfort. After the child "sitting down to die," the speaker says she does "know / what to do: do nothing:". The image has given her the knowledge the statistics could not, but what she learns is her own paralysis. The final colon promises an explanation that never comes. The line can be read as despair, or as a sarcastic quotation of the excuse we all make. I think it is also a trap, because a poem that confesses inaction so exactly is itself a refusal to look away.
That is why the poem lasts. It does not offer pity as a consolation. It exposes the way pity works, and how quickly images of suffering become wallpaper. The conflicts that prompted it have passed, but the habit it describes has not. Anyone who has scrolled past a terrible photograph and felt nothing will recognise the stain on the cushion.