Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-American poet.

• I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
  • Statement on poetics in The New American Poetry (1960) edited by Donald Allen

• To leave the open fields
  and enter the forest,

  that was the rite.
  Knowing there was mystery, they could go.
  Go back now! And he receded among the multitude of forms, the twists and shadows they saw now, listening to the hum of the world's wood.

  • "The Novices" (1960)

• Praise
  the invisible sun burning beyond
  the white cold sky, giving us
  light and the chimney's shadow.
  • Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus (1981); Online excerpt

• Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.
  • A Poets View (1984)

• I like to find
  what's not found
  at once, but lies

  within something of another nature,
  in repose, distinct.

  • Pleasures

• I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
  within the coarser leaf folded round,
  and the butteryellow glow

  in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
  opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

  • Pleasures

• The world is
  not with us enough.
  O taste and see.
  • This a response to William Wordsworth's famous statement: "The world is too much with us late and soon."

Full text online

• Two girls discover
  the secret of life
  in a sudden line of
  poetry.

  I who don't know the
  secret wrote
  the line.

• I love them
  for finding what
  I can't find,

  and for loving me
  for the line I wrote,
  and for forgetting it
  so that

  a thousand times, till death
  finds them, they may
  discover it again, in other
  lines

  in other
  happenings. And for
  wanting to know it,
  for

  assuming there is
  such a secret, yes,
  for that
  most of all.

• I was the first to see him, for I grew
                      out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
  He was a man, it seemed. . .

• Then as he sang
  it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
  he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
                      came into my roots
                                  out of the earth,
                      into my bark
                                  out of the air,
  into the pores of my greenest shoots
              gently as dew
  and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

• He told of journeys,
                      of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
                      of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
  deeper than roots ...
  He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
                      and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed
  my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
                                                              grew too fast in the spring
  when a late frost wounds it.

•                                              Fire he sang,
  that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
  New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
                      As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
                      were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
  up to the crown of me.
                      I was seed again.
                                          I was fern in the swamp.
                                                                          I was coal.

• And I
          in terror
                          but not in doubt of
                                                              what I must do
  in anguish, in haste,
                          wrenched from the earth root after root,
  the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
  and behind me the others: my brothers
  forgotten since dawn. In the forest
  they too had heard,
  and were pulling their roots in pain
  out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
                  rolling the rocks away,
                                              breaking themselves
                                                                  out of
                                                                          their depths.

•                                                     The music reached us.

  Clumsily,
              stumbling over our own roots,
                                                          rustling our leaves
                                                                              in answer,
  we moved, we followed.

• By dawn he was gone.
                                  We have stood here since,
  in our new life.
                          We have waited.
                                                      He does not return.

• It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
  what he sought.
                              It is said they felled him
  and cut up his limbs for firewood.
                                                              And it is said
  his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.

• Perhaps he will not return.
                                              But what we have lived
  comes back to us.
                          We see more.
                                                  We feel, as our rings increase,
  something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
                                                                                                      leaf-tips
  further.

• The wind, the birds,
                                                  do not sound poorer but clearer,
  recalling our agony, and the way we danced.

• There is a fence around the garden
  but the gate stands open.
  • "Bill"

• To me it seems perhaps
  Kropotkin understood half
  of what we need to know,
  and Lenin perhaps
  knew half, and true revolution … true revolution
  must put these two halves together?

• To serve the people,
  one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader.
  And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine,
  One must deeply imagine

that great Attention

Only so,
In lonely dialog,
can one reach the people.

• I am not joking. I'm speaking
  of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way.

• The poet
  never must lose despair.

• all of us know he means
  we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source,
  pretend it's not there, cover over
  the mineshaft of passion

• Leaps of nerve, heart —
  cries of communion: if there is bliss,
  it has
  been already
  and will be; out-
  reaching, utterly.
  Blind
  to itself, flooded
  with otherness.

• Let Ariel learn
  a blessing for Caliban
  and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
  open upon the waters.

• pure dust that is all
  in all.    Bless,
  weightless Spirit. Drink
  Caliban, push your tongue
  heavy into the calyx.

• I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.

• Delivered out of raw continual pain,
  smell of darkness, groans of those others
  to whom he was chained —

  unchained, and led
  past the sleepers,
  door after door silently opening —
  out!

  • St. Peter and the Angel

• And not till he saw the angel had left him,
  alone and free to resume
  the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
  what he had still to do,
  not till then did he recognize
  this was no dream.
  • St. Peter and the Angel

• He himself must be
  the key, now, to the next door,
  the next terrors of freedom and joy.
  • St. Peter and the Angel

• Lord, not you,
  it is I who am absent.

• Not for one second
  will my self hold still, but wanders
  anywhere,
  everywhere it can turn. Not you,
  it is I am absent.

• You are the stream, the fish, the light,
  the pulsing shadow.
  You the unchanging presence, in whom all
  moves and changes.
  How can I focus my flickering, perceive
  at the fountain's heart
  the sapphire I know is there?

• Down through the tomb's inward arch
  He has shouldered out into Limbo
  to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber...

•             Didmas,
  neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
  still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
  no one had washed and anointed, is here,
  for sequence is not known in Limbo;
  the promise, given from cross to cross
  at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.

• All these He will swiftly lead
  to the Paradise road: they are safe.
  That done, there must take place that struggle
  no human presumes to picture:
  living, dying, descending to rescue the just
  from shadow, were lesser travails
  than this: to break
  through earth and stone of the faithless world
  back to the cold sepulcher, tearstained
  stifling shroud; to break from them
  back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
  the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
  wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
  streaming through every cell of flesh
  so that if mortal sight could bear
  to perceive it, it would be seen
  His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
  and aching for home. He must return,
  first, in Divine patience, and know
  hunger again, and give
  to humble friends the joy
  of giving Him food — fish and a honeycomb.

• Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds — the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.
  • Bearing the Light

• Levertov was the first poet I ever saw read, and that was actually over twenty years ago. She was very important to me. Partly as a model, as a woman up there reading, partly because she knows how to end the poem more effectively than anybody I know.
  • Paula Gunn Allen Interview in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets by Joseph Bruchac (1987)

• Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other
  • Adrienne Rich, Interview (2001)

• Academy of American Poets: Levertov
• Modern American Poetry: Levertov
• Denise Levertov: The American Poet from Britain
• Women of the Beat Biography for Denise Levertov
• Bridgewater College: Denise Levertov
• The Secret