Denise Levertov Quotes

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

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.

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 poet never must lose despair.

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

The music reached us. Clumsily, stumbling over our own roots, rustling our leaves in answer, we moved, we followed.

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.

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.