Paul Lacey, editor of Denise Levertov Selected Poems suggests that Levertov’s poetry can be divided into three phases, the first phase being “the period when she was praised by the greatest number of critics for her ’sacramental’ and celebratory vision, and when she is most obviously influenced by Williams and learning American speech.”

Most of Levertov’s early poems I like focus on the nature of poetry or the appeals of the human body. Though few of her poems would probably be described as erotic by most readers, I found a number of them strangely so. Though this poem is certainly not erotic, it describes the human body and its feeling in an immediate, concrete style.

“The Prayer” suggests an ambiguity that most artists must have felt at one time or another for their “calling:”

The Prayer

At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem

and I drank of the brackish
spring there, dazed by the
gong beat of the sun,
mistaking it,

as I shrank from the eagle’s
black shadow crossing
that sky of cruel blue,
for the Pierian Spring–

and soon after
vomited my moussaka
and then my guts writhed
for some hours with diarrhea

until at dusk
among the stones of the goatpaths
breathing dust
I questioned my faith, or

within it wondered
if the god mocked me.
But since then, though it flickers or
shrinks to a

blue bead on the wick,
there’s that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,

flaring in laughter, stinging
my feet into a dance, so that
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god.

Apollo, of course, is the god of poetry and music, and prophesy, and had much appeal to the Romantic poets, so it’s not surprising that Levertov was drawn to his shrine.

The appeal of the poem, though, is the unexpected reaction to drinking from the holy spring. Instead of the expected “enlightenment,” the narrator gets violently ill, so physically ill that she questions her faith, though whether it’s her faith in magical springs or in her poetic talent is never quite clear.

This event transitions nicely into the larger question of whether the narrator’s poetic talent is a gift of the Gods or the gift of the Devil. Though I’ve never had talent enough to feel driven by it, much less tortured by it, I know a desire to say something can haunt you, driving you to ignore things you shouldn’t and pursue things best left alone, as I’m sure Leslie will testify to.

According to Paul Lacey the second section of Denise Levertov Selected Poems is the section when “she is most overtly, but never exclusively, political in her writing, most torn by doubts about her poetic vision, given over to grief at loss of her sister and her mother and when her marriage ends.” Little wonder, then, that some of these poems tend to be depressing, convincingly so, in fact.

I think I’ve noted that I don’t particularly like anti-war poems and will continue to believe slogans like “Poets Against the War” are relatively meaningless until someone can actually produce a group of poets who are for the war. Poetry by its very nature seems opposed to all that war represents.

That said, I love Levertov’s,

Life at War

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart . . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
so I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness; we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch in its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have
.

which may well be the greatest anti-war poem ever written.

I suspect I would have to read an awful lot of poetry to find a truer statement of the effect that a lifetime of war has had upon me than this poem. Born after the beginning of World War II, most of my life has been spent during wars, including my own experiences in Vietnam.

The fourth stanza’s “gray film” reminds me of Roethke’s powerful poem “Dolor” where the similar lines “Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,/ Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces” appear. It’s hard to imagine who we might be if we hadn’t spent our lives living through war after war, constantly bombarded with the latest news and pictures of the worst degradation man can inflict on each other.

When I was in Vietnam, I used to wonder what sort of black magic had transported me from college where I read poetry and watched pretty girls walk across campus to a land where everyone wanted to kill me and the only girls I knew were prostitutes forced to sell their bodies to survive.

How can someone who truly “believed one another/mirrored forms of a God” justify such actions? If we are made in God’s image, does that make God as ruthless and uncaring as most of us were who were trapped in that nightmare?

Do boys’ voices become deeper when they become men precisely because “nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying?”

If you’re really interested in exploring this poem in more depth, Modern American Poetry has twenty five pages of comments on this and related poems. I actually printed the whole section out, and once I’ve finished writing here will spend some time reading it.

Though I don’t like Levertov’s later poems as much as her earlier ones, there are still some I’m quite enthralled with. Perhaps only someone from the Pacific Northwest would choose the poems I’ve chosen here from Denise Levertov’s final poems, but luckily this is my blog not a formal review and I only have to tell you which poems I identify with, not which ones are her best poems, even though I’d like to think the two are occasionally the same.

Any Christianity I subscribe to is at best non-traditional, so I find it difficult to identify with many of Levertov’s poems written in the Catholic tradition, though I am strangely fond of a long one, perhaps the most traditional of all, called “Mass for the Days of St. Thomas Didymus.�

However, the poems that most appeal to me refer to Levertov’s final home in the Pacific Northwest, particularly those that use Mt. Rainier as a symbol:

Open Secret

Perhaps one day I shall let myself
approach the mountain—
hear the streams which must flow down it,
lie in a flowering meadow, even
touch my hand to the snow.
Perhaps not. I have no longing to do so.
I have visited other mountain heights.
This one is not, I think, to be known
by close scrutiny, by touch of foot or hand
or entire outstretched body; not by any
familiarity of behavior, any acquaintance
with its geology or the scarring roads
humans have carved in its flanks.
This mountain’s power
lies in the open secret of its remote
apparition, silvery low-relief
coming and going moonlike at the horizon,
always loftier, lonelier, than I ever remember

I would expect this kind of poem from someone who grew up in Seattle, not someone transplanted here. Mt. Rainier is an ever-present force here in the Northwest, and many of us who grew up here judge what kind of day it’s going to be by whether or not we can see the mountain on our way to school or work.

Levertov is right that the mountain is a presence (just as God is a presence?) whether you ever actually touch it directly or not. Though I love seeing the mountain hanging mid-air, I prefer to hike less visited areas perhaps because you’re actually more aware of the mountain’s presence when you’re walking other parts of the Cascades and look up to see it looming over you.

As I used to look at Rainier I could understand why the Greeks considered Mt. Olympus the home of the Gods. Part of earth, the mountain seems, distant, pure, above-it-all yet the most obvious part of all.

Apparently Levertov lived in the Northwest long enough to observe another common phenomena around here:

Witness

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..

In my neighborhood, houses that have a view of Mt. Rainier sell for hundreds of thousands more than my far-too-spendy home. I wouldn’t pay for a view lot even if I could afford one because I consider it a waste of money but, more importantly, because I’m afraid that, like most things, if I were exposed to the mountain every time I looked out the front window too soon I wouldn’t see the it at all.

It’s already too easy to just walk by the front flower garden on my way out to the wildlife refuge and forget there are flowers, bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds there continually throughout the day. I don’t want to become blind to the mountain, too.