Denise Levertov Quotes

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

An awe so quiet I don't know when it began.
A gratitude had begun to sing in me.
Was there some moment dividing song from no song?
When does dewfall begin?
When does night fold its arms over our hearts to cherish them?
When is daybreak?

I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.

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

I’ve always hated artificial flowers unless they were just flagrantly and beautifully, sort of brassily, artificial. But the good imitations, the ones that you think are real until you get up to them, and then there’s that awful dead plastic, are really vile. And the reason why I think they’re so vile is because so much of the beauty of a flower is in its very perishableness. One doesn’t want it to last forever, and accumulate dust.

1) Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
2) Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
3) Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
4) Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
5) Had they an epic poem?
6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways.
2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after the children were killed
there were no more buds.
3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
5) It is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
6) There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.

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

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. Horrors are taken for granted. Disorder is ordinary. People in general take more and more 'in their stride' — hides grow thicker. 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.

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

He quotes Ezra Pound saying in a 1948 manifesto, “You must understand what is happening”; and makes it clear the significant emphasis is on “what is happening,” the presentness, the process. “Most verse,” Duncan comments, “is something being made up to communicate a thing already present in the mind — or a lot of it is. And don’t pay the attention it shld to what the poet don’t know — and won’t [know] until the process speaks.

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

Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons
off the tree! I don't want
to forget who I am, what has burned in me,
and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

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.

When he opens his eyes he gives to what he gazes at the recognition no look ever before granted it. It becomes a word.