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.
As a poet, having faith in what Keats called "the truth of the imagination," Denise Levertov's pilgrimage gradually led her to Christian faith. "I've come to see," she wrote, "certain analogies, and also some interaction, between the journey of art and the journey of faith." Beginning a work of art "resembles moving from intellectual assent to opening the acts of daily life to permeation by religious faith."
As she worked on a poem first intended as an exploration of the primal form of the Catholic Mass, she anticipated it as agnostic. "A few months later....I discovered myself to be in a different relationship to the material and to the liturgical form from that in which I had begun. The experience of writing the poem - that long swim through waters of unknown depth - had also become a conversion process." That long swim through unknown waters lasted the rest of her life, journey of art, doubt, faith, always fueled by the need
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.
Among Levertov's last poems is a beautiful story of the "Conversion of Brother Lawrence," a 17th century monk who drew her again into that witnessing presence.
everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside
the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence
your being had opened to. Where it shone,
there life was,and abundantly; it touched
your dullest task, and the task was easy.
Joyful,absorbed,
you 'practiced the presence of God' as a musician
practices hour after hour his art:
'A stone before the carver,'
you 'entered into yourself.'