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Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 - 20 December 1997) British-born American poet
Sourced
- 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
- Acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry.
- 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 Tree Telling of Orpheus
- 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.
O Taste and See: New Poems (1964)
- 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."
The Secret
- 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.
The Freeing of the Dust (1975)
Conversation in Moscow
- 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.
Freedom
- 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.
The Freeing of the Dust
- 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.
The Wealth of the Destitute
- I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'.
Oblique Prayers (1984)
- 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.
- He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.
A Door in the Hive (1989)
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
- 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.
- ...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—
Sands of the Well (1994)
- 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.
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