The Ring at the Bottom: Denise Levertov’s Wedding-Ring and the Alchemy of Letting Go
Letting go is not a dramatic picture.
It is a ring that lies at the bottom of a well.
Not lost, not thrown; but placed.
Left behind with quiet deliberation.
That’s where Denise Levertov begins her poem Wedding-Ring, not with conflict or climax, but with aftermath, with the object no longer in use.
The poem does not ask what went wrong nor does it attempt at a repair.
Instead, it holds the silence that follows a parting and explores the subtle transformations that silence invites.
…lying in a basket
as if at the bottom of a well.
Nothing will come to fish it back up
and onto my finger again.
The first stanza offers no ornamentation, just distance.
The wedding ring is no longer worn, not even remembered on the hand.
It has become an artifact, lying “as if at the bottom of a well;” a metaphor that pulls us not into nostalgia, but into the depths of the unconscious, into the still place where old identities settle when their usefulness has expired.
This is not the drama of a breakup, but the stillness after the storm.
Levertov’s speaker is not crying; she is noticing.
The ring is not stolen, broken, or flung into a lake; it is simply down there, unreachable, unneeded.
The metaphor carries more than finality; it carries reverence.
Something once sacred has been allowed to descend, not violently, but with gravity.
Reading these lines, I couldn’t help but recall the end of my last relationship; not in the emotional spiral of it, but in the strange flatness that followed.
The way a shared space became uncanny.
The way her absence took up more room than her presence ever did.
But that experience is not the point.
It is merely the echo.
The poem does the real work.
The poem names something we rarely allow ourselves to say: sometimes what was sacred must be laid down.
Relics of Love: When Objects Become Emotional Ruins
…among keys to abandoned houses,
nails waiting to be needed and hammered.
Levertov’s imagery here is astonishing in its restraint.
The ring is not alone.
It rests beside other relics of disuse: keys that no longer open, nails awaiting a purpose that will not come.
This is not a graveyard of failure, but a tableau of time.
Of things that once mattered and now don’t.
Of function interrupted by change.
The poem doesn’t mourn these items, it doesn’t wish them back into circulation, instead, it honors them by naming them without flinching.
That’s the emotional temperature of Wedding-Ring, not detachment, but acceptance.
A clear-eyed acknowledgment that objects, like relationships, have seasons.
What this stanza illuminates so powerfully is the quiet architecture of emotional residue.
How we live among the past even after it has ceased to govern us.
How memory becomes matter.
And how that matter, left untouched, begins to soften, to take its place in the background of our lives like keys to doors we no longer try.
It reminded me of the way I once found an old note in a drawer, her handwriting, some mundane errand, but it felt like an artifact dug up from another civilization.
There was no pain left in it.
Just a recognition that it belonged to a version of life I no longer inhabited.
The Courage to Say: “That Time Is Gone”
The marriage was good in its own
time, though that time is gone.
Here is the poem’s pivot; not a turn of plot, but of perception.
Levertov acknowledges not just the end of the relationship but the integrity of its moment.
The marriage was good, then.
The poem doesn’t retreat into bitterness or betrayal; it doesn’t disassemble the past to make the speaker feel better in the present.
It allows that the love was real, the commitment sincere, and still, it is over.
This is a more radical truth than we usually allow ourselves.
Our culture is obsessed with permanence; either in the form of unbreakable bonds or definitive ruptures.
But Wedding-Ring holds space for a third path: reverence without return.
To say something was good and is gone requires an emotional maturity that few poems, or people, manage.
But Levertov does it in a single breath.
This insight was transformative for me.
After my own breakup, I spent months trying to solve a mystery that had no resolution; asking why, when, what if.
But none of those questions honored the truth.
The relationship, like the marriage in the poem, was good in its time.
And that time had passed.
There is immense dignity in naming the past without needing to revise it.
That is what Levertov offers us.
It is not so much closure as it is clarity.
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Alchemical Breakthroughs: Transmuting What Once Held You
Could some artificer
beat into it bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal…
Here the poem shifts again, from reflection into imagination.
The speaker wonders whether the ring, that discarded symbol, might be remade; not restored to its original use, but transformed into something unrecognizable and new.
The vision is one of alchemical artistry.
Not to erase the past, but to transmute its material.
What’s powerful about this gesture is that it does not attempt to retrieve the past.
The speaker does not want to wear the ring again.
She does not even want it to symbolize union.
She wants it to become something else; a new object, severed from its original purpose.
This is the emotional core of the poem.
Wedding-Ring is not about grief.
It’s about creative evolution.
About how what once held weight in the transmutation of letting go, can become light.
How what once signified forever can now signify freedom.
For me, this wasn’t about taking up jewelry making or reinventing my old relationship into friendship.
It was about recognizing that my own identity, my own perception of myself, my self-esteem had been fused too tightly with someone else’s presence.
And now that they were gone, I could reshape what remained.
The grief became material; something to work with.
If this nudges something beneath the surface—something raw, real, or quietly true—step into Emotional Intelligence / Poetic Intelligence. It’s not just about understanding feelings; it’s about navigating power, presence, and perception with depth. For those ready to lead from within.
The Power of Reframing: From Burden to Generous Offering
…or to make promises
living will not let them keep?
…a simple gift I could give in friendship.
Levertov closes not with despair but with generosity.
The ring, transformed, might still be given; not as a promise, but as a gesture.
Not to bind, but to share.
This is the final move of the poem: from possession to offering.
This is not a grand gesture.
It is humble.
A simple gift.
It does not deny the past, nor pretend the object has no meaning.
It simply accepts that meaning evolves, that letting go transforms.
What once marked a vow can now mark release.
And in that transformation, there is grace.
Levertov’s final image invites us into a new ethic of memory.
One where the past is not an anchor, but a resource.
Where objects are not haunted, but repurposed.
Where relationships, once ended, are not erased but refined.
Strategic Letting Go: Why Some Endings Are Your Best Leverage
Wedding-Ring is not a poem of heartbreak.
It is a poem of passage.
Of laying down what once was, without bitterness.
Of holding the residue of love without demanding its return.
It is not a poem of triumph, but of transmutation.
There are many ways to leave someone.
There are fewer ways to stay gone with grace.
Levertov does not dramatize the leaving.
She writes instead about what is left: a ring, a basket, some keys, a memory reframed.
And that is what gives the poem its quiet power; it doesn’t seek catharsis, but clarity.
And perhaps this is the deeper invitation: to see our lives not as linear stories with neat endings, but as a series of transformations.
To let the ring become something else.
To let ourselves become something else.
Not by forgetting what was, but by forging anew what might still be given.
Even if, in the end, it’s just a simple gift.
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