(for Gil and Liz Bailie)
Denise Levertov, photo by David Geier
Denise Levertov's last volume of poems, This Great Unknowing: Last Poems, was posthumously published by New Directions in 1999. She died from complications of lymphoma two years before at the age of 74. Her father was a Hasidic Jew who converted to Christianity and became an Anglican parson in England. Levertov came to the U.S. in 1948 at the age of 25. She was a major voice in American poetry for over forty years. Among her persistent themes, as Robert Haas has written, were "the brokenness of the world, its violence and injustice, and her longing for wholeness, the longing that sent her back to her Christian roots at the end of her life." The first poem reproduced below, "Aware," is the last she wrote. "The Fountain" was written in the 1960s, "I learned that her name was Proverb" twenty years later, so these three poems span some thirty years of writing.
In a final interview only two months before her death, Levertov said, "There's a lot of dependence on technology today, and a willful ignorance that it's messing up resources, may end up destroying life on this planet, and then we'll have to start over without it. Our ethical development does not match our technological development. This sense of spiritual hunger is something of a counterforce or unconscious reaction to all that technological euphoria....When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."
She once wrote that she found "certain analogies, and also interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith," and in an essay written in 1984, "A Poet's View," she said that the "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 evidence, 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 believe that is an important statement about the centrality of imagination in spiritual life, in our capacity as artists, scientists or parents--as human beings--to realize ourselves and truly to embrace our fellowship with creation. Imagination, as Levertov uncommonly recognizes, is a faculty of perception. It can be terribly misused--think, after all, of the inhumane ways we have synthesized "intellect, emotion and instinct"--but without its creative exercise we remain, as Hasidic legend has it, imprisoned "as in a block, so that [our] hands and feet cannot stretch themselves and the head lies on the knees." That is suffering, and that is a posture of prayer.
Aware
When I found the door
I found the vine leaves
speaking among themselves in abundant
whispers.
My presence made them
hush their green breath,
embarrassed, the way
humans stand up, buttoning their jackets,
acting as if they were leaving anyway, as if
the conversation had ended
just before you arrived.
I liked
the glimpse I had, though,
of their obscure
gestures. I liked the sound
of such private voices. Next time
I'll move like cautious sunlight, open
the door by fractions, eavesdrop
peacefully.
The Fountain
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes
found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched—but not because
she grudged the water,
only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.
Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,
it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,
up and out through the rock.
'I learned that her name was Proverb'
And the secret names
of all we meet who lead us deeper
into our labyrinth
of valleys and mountains, twisting valleys
and steeper mountains—
their hidden names are always,
like Proverb, promises.
Rune, Omen, Fable, Parable,
those we meet for only
one crucial moment, gaze to gaze,
or for years know and don’t recognize
but of whom later a word
sings back to us
as if from high among leaves,
still near but beyond sight
drawing us from tree to tree
towards the time and the unknown place
where we shall know
what it is to arrive.
