Seven years ago I wrote here in Reckonings a few words about three poems of
Denise Levertov, which stand now as well as they did then as reason for my
sustained admiration:
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."
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 wrote 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.
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.
Variation On A Theme By Rilke
(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)*
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.
~ Denise Levertov ~
(Breathing the Water)
* Book 1, Poem 1 of Rilke's Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and
and Anita Barrows:
The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.
I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.