religious values. Decades before the general public awakened to the need to respect the physical world, Levertov spoke of the mystery in the objects people taste, touch, and see: the Moon, food, a glass of water. She found both happiness and wisdom in the realization of mystery. Increasingly, in her later poetry, the value of mystical and religious experience became her theme.

Religious significance

Levertov links the imagination with truth in poetry; thus, the poem has a religious significance. As “religion” literally means “binding anew,” she finds connections to be the essence or truth of imagination. In the poem “A Straw Swan Under the Christmas Tree,” she writes, “All trivial parts of/ world-about-us speak in their forms/ of themselves and their counterparts! . . . one speech conjuring the other.” The human emotion of sympathy depends on understanding the connections in animate and also inanimate life. “May the taste of salt/ recall to us the great depths about us,” she writes in “The Depths.” The principle of interrelated form applies even in the extreme case of Nazi leader Karl Adolf Eichmann. In “During the Eichmann Trial,” she says that if one looks accurately into another face, or into a mirror, one sees “the other,” even Eichmann. This oneness is a mystery, and something Eichmann did not know: “We are members/ one of another.”

One should not conclude, however, that the truth of imagination Levertov seeks is an intellectual truth. Unlike the poet Dante, who moves from love and care in the physical world to a spiritual and intellectual understanding of love, Levertov remains firmly based in the physical realm, however far along the mystical path she may travel. Perhaps in the modern age the presence of evil within and without is so strong that the poet dares not abandon her mooring in the physical “real” world that needs so much assistance. Humanity is “a criminal kind, the planet’s nightmare” (as she quotes Robinson Jeffers in the poem “Kith and Kin”). The truth she continually explores remains the connection in the patterns of human and natural life. Courage is a necessity, and models of courage may be found in her lean, economical poetic voice.

Diction and imagery

A “speaking-voice” quality in Levertov’s poems results from the open form of uneven line lengths. In keeping with the tone of a human voice in natural and varied cadences, her diction neither startles nor challenges the reader with rare and exotic words in the manner of Marianne Moore or Edith Sitwell. She “tunes up” or increases the vibrancy of her poems by making them “tight,” with no excess words or phrases. She often omits subjects and verbs, punctuating a fragment as though it were a sentence, and alternates or intersperses fragments with complete sentences. Another skill is accuracy in word choice, using the best word to evoke the scene, the object, the person, or the feeling she is describing. She can change the feeling of a line by inserting words from another collocation—sets of words often found together. For example, in a late poem, “Those Who Want Out,” from A Door in the Hive, she describes people who are designing permanent colonies in space—their optimism, their love of speed and machines that are “outside of nature.” Then a closing line judges them with icy and stern tone in six one-syllable words with biblical power: “They do not love the earth.” This use of sparse, plain Anglo-Saxon English for a “stopper” of great power is found frequently in William Shakespeare.

Along with devices of diction, poetic speech uses images to convey truth. Levertov’s images are most frequently from the natural world—plants, animals, and landscapes—and of everyday household objects. “In the Unknown” takes the reader to the poet’s home: “As if the white page/ were a clean tablecloth,/ as if the vacuumed floor were a primed canvas.” In “To the Muse,” she describes the body as the house one lives in and the place to find one’s inner poetry. There are many rooms in this house, and when the Muse seems to have departed, she is hiding, like a lost gold ring. One has forgotten to make a place for her, and to bring her back, one needs to attend to the house, find some flowers to decorate it, and be alert to the Muse with all one’s senses. Images of caves, mirrors, water, cloud, shadow, and moon fill her poems to make her feelings and ideas accessible to the common reader.

Roles of the poet

In harmony with her use of diction and form, Levertov expressed a modest view of the poet: a person who can articulate feeling through the medium of language. She refused the exalted aura of a supersensitive person whose feelings are beyond the reach of ordinary human beings. Glorification by “temperament” was never attractive to her and was as suspect as misplaced romantic adulation—not a twentieth century ideal. It was the process of writing, not the result, that fascinated her. She saw poems as structures of meaning and sound that convey feelings accurately. The poet must revise and polish until the poem is complete. Technical skill with diction, form, rhythm, syntax, and sound—above all, sound—raises a poem from mediocrity to perfection. As a teacher, she had much experience to share. From her essays and articles on the subject of poetry one can gain information about many technical aspects of her craft. Her poems are more readily understood when one is familiar with these principles.

Versification

Like many young poets, Levertov experimented in her early writings with various rhyme schemes, tones, and forms. A 1946 poem, “Folding a Shirt,” uses Dante’s interlacing terza rima rhyme pattern for six stanzas: aba bcb cdc ded efe fgf. “Midnight Quatrains” rhymes the second and fourth end words of each stanza. There are dramatic poems in dialogue form and ballads. Typically, however, Levertov’s poems have no end rhyme or regular meter. (The lack of regular rhyme and stressed beats in most modern poetry has been attributed to the chaos and irregularity in the twentieth century— poetry reflects life.) Her rhythm is subtle, moving with the line break. Uneven lines are the rule, not the exception. The placement of words and indentations create rhythmic ebb and flow, abrupt interruptions, slow pauses, and dramatic suspense. The eye follows a varied typography that signals rhythm with blank space and black ink, like a design for reading aloud. The “melos” or song quality of such an open form comes from the rightness of the line length—the line’s appropriate length in the poem’s internal system of meanings.

As well as obtaining rhythm by a masterful use of line breaks, Levertov excels in the construction of sentences within the poem. Often a poem is built like an argument: a proposition followed by a rebuttal, in the way of a sonnet. The poem’s syntax often matches the idea of the poem. In “The Prayer,” the poet is praying to Apollo at Delphi for the flame of her poetry to be maintained. As if the poem were the flame, it keeps going until the poet breaks the sentence when she begins to wonder whether the god is mocking her. The sentence ends at the same time that her belief in the god falters. The second sentence, a reprise, says that the flame is flickering, and perhaps it is some other god at work. In a very sensual poem, “Eros at Temple Stream,” she pictures lovers bathing near a river, soaping each other with long, slippery strokes—their hands as flames. The poem’s syntax—one long sentence with no punctuation at its close—mirrors the meaning.

Narrative and dramatic poems

In Levertov’s narrative and dramatic poems, she set the stage quickly. A mini-play, “Scenario,” opens bluntly: “The theater of war. Offstage/ a cast of thousands weeping.” A poem about animal life at the dump begins, “At the dump bullfrogs/ converse as usual.” Often these poems begin with brief noun phrases, as in “A Hunger”: “Black beans, white sunlight.” Levertov’s impulse for story and drama resulted in a number of long poem sequences and poetic plays. “Staying Alive,” with its prologue and four parts with entr’actes, vividly recalls events and feelings at the height of the Vietnam War protests and the People’s Park struggle in Berkeley, California, in 1969. In 1983, an oratorio, El Salvador: Requiem and Invocation, was performed at Harvard University; the text by Levertov was set to music by the composer W. Newell Hendricks. Using the structures of the Johann Sebastian Bach passions and George Frideric Handel and Franz Josef Haydn oratorios, Levertov wrote voices for a narrator, Archbishop Oscar Romero, a questioner, nuns, and a chorus. She studied the speeches of the murdered archbishop and quoted his words as well as passages from Mayan prayers. The work was given to help fund-raising efforts of relief organizations active in Central America.

Political poems

That the poet should be also a political person came as an early and natural revelation to Levertov. Her first published poem, “Listening to Distant Guns” (1940), tells of hearing “a low pulsation in the East” that “betrays no whisper of the battle scream.” She actually heard the guns of World War II from the south coast of England, to where she, along with many young people, had been evacuated from the city of London. She herself was safe, but the war was very near. She describes the dismal feelings of the English people in “Christmas 1944,” when no celebration could hide the blackout curtains on the windows, the knowledge of “fear knocking on the door” of so many Europeans. She gives a welcome: “Come in, then poverty, and come in, death:/ This year too many lie cold, or die in cold.” During her impressionable teens and early twenties, she was surrounded with war. Although two decades would pass before her active involvement in the American antiwar movement, she had already expressed her grief at the mass destruction war brings.

In “On the Edge of Darkness: What Is Political Poetry?” (originally a lecture delivered at Boston University in 1975), Levertov defends the idea that a lyric poem can be simultaneously intimate, passionate, and political. Indeed, there is a long history of poets speaking out their political ideas—generally, though not always, in defense of liberty and peace. Contemporary “political” poets usually participate actively in the struggles of which they write. Specific issues give rise to topical poetry on race, class, environment, and gender problems. These poems, like the songs associated with the struggles, change the feelings of the listeners and readers; they alter the awareness of a community. The standards of aesthetic value apply to this poetry as to all other; it should arouse the whole being of the listener: mind, senses, and spirit.

Antiwar poetry

By 1966, Levertov was writing poems about the war in Vietnam. The most influential and famous of these is probably “Life at War.” Speaking for her contemporaries, she tells of war’s pervasive influence in her century—“We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives”—and then begins a long lament over the damage war has done to people’s imaginations. The modern imagination, she argues, is “filmed over with the gray filth of it,” because humankind (and here she lists wonderful and praiseworthy achievements and powers of human beings) “whose language imagines mercy and lovingkindness,” can schedule the burning of children’s bodies. “Burned human flesh/ is smelling in Vietnam as I write.” As a former nurse, Levertov can bring her sensual awareness into her passionate denunciation of modern war. The poem closes with a statement that humankind needs the “deep intelligence” that living at peace can give. The violence to human imagination from war comes from its insult to intelligence.

Other antiwar poems were composed in the form of dialogues such as questions and answers about Vietnamese people or a narrator questioning a bomber pilot. Levertov’s poems also protest the false language of war communiqués. She pays tribute to the young men and women antiwar activists—those who die, those who live, those who go to jail. One poem honors her friend and fellow poet Muriel Rukeyser, who went to Vietnam with her in 1972. Both women had sons who were teenagers at the time and faced the possibility of being drafted into the military.

Marriage and family life

Family life, and in particular marriage, inspired many of Levertov’s most memorable poems. In keeping with her insistence on the beauty of sensual experience, she celebrated the joy of marriage. The short poem “Bedtime” puts the contentment of fulfilled love in natural terms: “We are a meadow where the bees hum,/ mind and body are almost one.” “Hymn to Eros” praises the “drowsy god” who quietly circles in “a snowfall hush.” Two beautiful poems to her son, Nikolai, are spaced years apart—one before his birth, “Who He Was,” and one, “The Son,” as he becomes a man. The first tells of his conception, gestation, and birth, and the second of skills he has gained.

The death of love and the contemporary difficulties in male-female relationships also provide subjects for notable poems. The much-quoted “About Marriage” begins with a cry for freedom, “Don’t lock me in wedlock, I want/ marriage, an/ encounter,” and concludes, “I would be/ met/ and meet you/ so,/ in a green/ airy space, not/ locked in.” As the women’s movement and the antiwar movement seemed to merge, the desire for peace and independence became the message of many women writers and poets. “The Ache of Marriage” compares marriage to Jonah’s life in the belly of a whale; the poet and her spouse are looking for joy, “some joy/ not to be known outside it.” Marriage is not discarded as an ideal, but its confinement brings problems to women who feel an urge to work in a wider field. In “Hypocrite Women,” Levertov tells women that they should not be ashamed of their “unwomanly” traits but should admit boldly the truth of their lives.

The nature of another woman-to-woman relationship is explored in the “Olga” poems. Levertov’s sister, older by seven years, was estranged from her family for many years. Her death brought a recollection and definition of the two lives that were linked in dream and memory but separated by behavior, circumstances, and distance. The gaze of her sister’s eyes haunts the poet: “eyes with some vision/ of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining,/ unknowable gaze.” Poems to her mother and father join poems to other poets as Levertov continually seeks and writes about the connections in her life. Rilke, Rukeyser, Boris Pasternak, Robert Duncan, and Pablo Neruda are some of the poets she addressed in poems.

Travel and dreamscapes

Reflecting the world consciousness typical of Americans in the second half of the twentieth century, Levertov traveled widely. Many of her poems describe the people and places she visited in Europe, Mexico, the United States, and Asia. Distant places remain alive in memory with sensual evocations—dreamscapes. The perfume of linden trees in blossom in an ancient European town is recalled in “The Past.” Feelings of comfortable married happiness mingle with the beauty of the setting. The poem “In Tonga” describes the life of sacred bats hanging in their caves, squeaking in night flight. The poet muses about them, “If they could think/ it would not be of us.” “Poem from Manhattan” builds a prayer and invocation to New York City through its power, energy, and hope—“city, act of joy”—to its desolation—“city, gesture of greed.” Moral and spiritual awareness accompanies the poet’s sensory connections to the world.

Mysticism

The mystical and religious tones of Levertov’s poetry can be traced from their beginnings to their full flowering in the poems of the 1980’s collected in two volumes, Breathing the Water and A Door in the Hive. The daughter of a clergyman who was steeped in mystical Jewish Hasidism, Levertov showed her familiarity with religious texts in early poems. “Notes of a Scale” gives four moments of wonder; its reference note directs the reader to Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters (1975). The poem “Sparks” includes passages from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. In this work, Levertov moves easily from the ancient Hebrew text to the circumstances of a modern life. Not only Jewish mysticism but also Christian tradition inspired her poetry. Later poems take as their themes the annunciation to Mary, Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed, and the path of Calvary.

Levertov’s religious poetry is deeply imbued as well with thoughts on the lives and works of religious saints and writers. Saint Thomas Didymus, Julian of Norwich, William Blake, William Everson, and W. H. Auden are evoked in various poems. One should remember, also, that she translated religious poetry of the Bengali Vaishnava faith. Collaborating with the scholar Edward C. Dimock, Jr., she published this fascinating poetry under the title In Praise of Krishna: Songs from the Bengali. The warm emotional and erotic content of these poems has a kinship to Levertov’s sensual approach to religious mysticism.

Dream-based poems

Access to religious symbols often comes in dreams. The immensely influential biblical accounts of dream visions (those of Ezekiel, Daniel, and John of Patmos, among others) echo in texts from every century. Many of these dream visions were part of Levertov’s own home educational fare. She wrote of two childhood dreams. One consisted of a violent transformation from a rustic scene of happiness to a scene of burning and devastation. The other recurring dream was of a large country house made of a warm pink stone; its name was Mazinger Hall. These two dreams, like the later ones she used in poems, carry emotional content of joy and sorrow, gain and loss, security and terror. Gradually, her dream material was transformed into poems that evoke similar feelings in her readers.

In Levertov’s early dream-based poems, the process of transferring a dream to a poem involved describing the dream content. The poet explained that later, after analytical work on her dreams, she abandoned that objectivity and gave her images stronger and clearer emotional force to present the dream content more directly to the reader. A third stage in this process came with the realization that the dream needs a literary form that cannot be imposed but must be listened for. Several times she found that a dream worked only as a prose tale. The stories “Say the Word” and “A Dream” began as poems that she transformed to a rhythmic prose. The experience of using dream material for a work of art teaches the poet that the poem must be not only visually clear but also morally or emotionally significant for the reader. An expression that is too private does not make an effective poem.

Another kind of dream poem may result from an auditory message received in a dream state, or as a combined visual and auditory dream. Levertov experienced each type and made poems of them. In “The Flight,” she retells a vision of the poet and mystic William Blake, who spoke the words, “The will is given us that we may know the delights of surrender.” She waited several years before composing a poem about that experience, to avoid a too-literal transcription. Again, an auditory message was received in a dream about Pasternak. The visual scene disappeared from memory, but the words remained. In both instances, as Levertov explains, the quality of the resulting poem came from the poet’s willingness to recognize and absorb a hidden quality that lay beyond the superficial appearances. Some dream images may indicate the questions or problems present at that moment in the poet’s life. In that case, the truth of the life and the truth of the dream provide an interplay that makes a powerful poem.

Honey of the human

The religious message that hums (a favorite Levertov verb) throughout her poetry is the oneness of all life: all human beings, animals, trees, and the great elements of earth, air, fire, and water. The vision of air and water blended comes in poems about bees, honey, and ocean currents that hold “my seafern arms.” The cleansing properties of honey in the hive, she writes in “Second Didactic Poem,” neutralize even the poison of disease organisms. That hive with its transforming power may be the same as human activity—“honey of the human.” Transformation may also move in the opposite direction, from a joyful morning self-confidence to a rapid pace that diminishes the person (“Remembering”). These apparent divisions between good and evil in a person’s emotional life can be harmonized from a point of view that is wide enough to encompass the other side, or opposite, in what is experienced.

Certain lines of Levertov’s poetry shine as lighthouse beacons across the restless waters of human experience: for example, “We are one of another” (“A Vision”), the lovely love song “We are a meadow where the bees hum” (“Bedtime”), and “To speak of sorrow/ works upon it” (“To Speak”). Why do these lines hum in the mind years after they are first encountered? In them one finds three qualities that characterize Levertov’s poetic work: music, morality, and mysticism. Her best poems are true lyrics—songs, in their flowing rhythms and enchanting sound patterns of vowel and consonant combinations. Moreover, she teaches the lessons modern Americans need to hear, about respect for natural life and for unprotected, helpless human beings, especially children and the elderly. Then there is the wonder she shares in the magic of common things—the “gleam of water in the bedside glass” (“Midnight Gladness”) and the moonlight crossing her room (“The Well”). Levertov said, “There is no magic, only facts”; her magic is found in accurate and loving observation of everyday shapes, colors, and sounds.

Legacy

Beyond her mastery of the poem’s form and even beyond the thought content, Levertov’s poetry nevertheless can be appreciated for the qualities of the poet herself. During the 1960’s, before the women’s movement had strengthened the fragile position of women poets, when a cult of death followed the suicides of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, Levertov lamented their loss, not only because they were fine poets but also because their deaths would confirm a popular conception of the poet as abnormally sensitive, often on the edge of madness. For her, alcoholism and nervous breakdowns were not signs of poetic talent. Creativity, she wrote, belongs to responsible, mature adults who take citizenship seriously. In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, she put this antiromantic view to the service of the peace and women’s rights movements—marching, protesting, speaking against social injustices. She called attention to the political poets imprisoned in many countries. In the 1980’s, she produced poetry of great beauty on the human and material sources of her spiritual inspiration.

Indeed, one of her last volumes of poetry, Sands of the Well, showed the beginning of a pronounced shift from her poems of social engagement to a more all-encompassing focus on a spirituality that transcended simple Christianity. Her lasting legacy was to show that a poet in the United States can support herself economically. Generously and with humor, she shared with students the fruits of her years of practicing her craft. In all these ways, she modeled a high standard for both poetry and the poet.