Denise Levertov Quotes

To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

"That Passeth All Understanding"

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?

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry. I who don't know the secret wrote the line.

I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

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

A certain day became a presence to me; there it was, confronting me - a sky, air, light: a being. And before it started to descend from the height of noon, it leaned over and struck my shoulder as if with the flat of a sword, granting me honor and a task. The day's blow rang out, metallic - or it was I, a bell awakened, and what I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

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.

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.

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.

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 poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.