[Wakoski is an American poet and educator whose verse collections include The George Washington Poems (1967), Virtuoso Literature for Two and Four Hands (1975), and The Collected Greed, Parts 1-13 (1984). In the following review of Breathing the Water, Wakoski finds that much of Levertov's work reflects a "linking of body and soul through God" while it also recognizes the attraction and danger of the natural world.]

Others will speak of her spirit's tendrils reaching
almost palpably into the world;
but I will remember her body's
unexpected beauty
seen in the fragrant redwood sauna …

American poetry, like American culture, has manifested from the beginning an unlikely combination of the material and the spiritual. We are pragmatists, grounded in our physical world, but for some reason we do not accept this as a limitation. We continue to see the spiritual rising out of the material, and our great poets like Whitman talk as if God were in all of us intermingled with the natural world:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is …

In his excellent book, Kenneth Patchen and American Mysticism (1984), Ray Nelson traces the Whitman tradition and shows the mainstream poets of our culture reaching for a religious experience which is not doctrinally located, though the Quaker religion has in fact influenced more than its share of our writers. Levertov is no exception to this, and in her most recent collection of poems she can no longer conceal the fact that she is a religious poet, though like Whitman and Emerson she certainly has experienced no conversion or long-time adherence to a particular dogma or theology or even an organized religion.

Levertov's poetry, like most American mysticism, is grounded in Christianity, but like Whitman and other American mystics her discovery of God is the discovery of God in herself, and an attempt to understand how that self is a "natural" part of the world, intermingling with everything pantheistically, ecologically, socially, historically and, for Levertov, always lyrically. Perhaps her search has from the beginning looked like an aesthetic rather than religious quest, though from the beginning she has spoken of God and never seemed to be unwilling to label her own journey as spiritual. But until now her somewhat inconsistent politics, and a stance which certainly embraces no specific religious doctrine or set of religious observances, have confused the issue.

In Breathing the Water the linking of body and soul through God is made so clear that even the most obtuse reader can see it. In meditating on the religious mystic Lady Julian of Norwich, Levertov asks that we see the world as a hazelnut placed in the hand in order to understand the relationship between God and humanity:

God for a moment in our history
placed in that five-fingered
human nest
the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox,
brown hazelnut of All that Is—
made, and belov'd, and preserved.
As still, waking each day within
our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves.

It hasn't always been so obvious what Levertov was up to, and some of the pleasures of this book come from seeing the focusing of a lifetime career of writing beautiful, lyric poems, interspersed with militant political ones. What becomes apparent in Breathing the Water is that a distinct mystical religious vision has informed the poetry from the very beginning, and a struggle to understand God's meaning and intentions for the world.

Levertov's early poetry was a celebration, among other things, of the sexual, Dionysian creative powers of her feminine self and world. In one of my favorites of her lyrical invocations to the powers that be, "To the Snake," from Eyes at the Black of Our Heads (1960), she hangs a snake around her neck and sings to it, telling it that while she reassured her "companions" that the snake was "harmless" in spite of its "cold pulsing throat" which "hissed" at her, she herself "had no certainty" but knew that she needed to hold it there. She releases the snake back to nature, where it "faded into the pattern / of grass and shadows," and concludes the poem "and I returned / smiling and haunted, to a dark morning." In this poem, as in Whitman's lines in "Song of Myself," "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grasses I love, / If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles," Levertov longs to identify herself with the natural world, to mingle with it, even though she is not quite sure it will not harm her.

The second section of Breathing the Water opens with a poem called "Zeroing In." A man and a woman compare the dangers of life to walking in a landscape dotted with bogs. The man tells the story of a dog he had as a boy which had to be put down because it bit a child who touched an injured spot on its head; at the end of the poem the woman says

Life, the snake, in the earlier poem, is only potentially dangerous; in this last book, Levertov shows us how dangerous the natural forces are. Yet no knowledge keeps the speaker from touching the bruised spot, just as no warning keeps the young poet from putting the snake around her neck.

Levertov's single best collection of poems, Life in the Forest (1978), included a series of poems about the last year of her mother's life, which was lived in Mexico; that semitropical landscape becomes for Levertov an embodiment of the archetypal Garden. It is in this book that we first begin to see how seriously Levertov has pursued the myth of the Garden from her early sense of herself, like Eve, daring to mingle with it, embracing the snake as a necklace in spite of her friends' warnings. The constant temptations of life never deter her, though she always suspects their danger. In "Death in Mexico" her vision of what that danger is emerges. Describing the English-style country garden which her mother has created around her house in Mexico and cultivated carefully over the years, Levertov depicts its rapid crumbling and disintegration after only a few weeks of neglect during her mother's terminal illness. The landscape is returning to its natural jungle state, and in its ruins Levertov sees a primitive reality.

This is what must be feared; that in death, in each personal death, civilization as we know it dies. Perhaps the "Old Gods" are the body, the physical world, always there and always with a primitive power and potentially dangerous capability. Like all mystics, Levertov believes in a God or the knowledge of a God within oneself which is beyond doctrine and organized religion. Sometimes this God takes the face of art or civilization or government or human will, but the marrying of those two elements, the body and the spirit, must be a marrying of the "Old Gods" and the personal God. "Life in the forest" will always be dangerous and primitive, but we cannot resist the beauty of the snake.

One of the loveliest poems in Breathing the Water is "The Well."

In this poem, a kind of latter-day "Eve of St. Agnes," Levertov tells us how she religiously (my word; she uses "diligently") "moonbathed" as others sunbathe. On the dark nights she permitted herself to sleep deeply; it was the bathing in darkness, not the sleepless moonlit nights, which left her feeling refreshed "and if not beautiful / filled with some other power." That "power" by implication is the power of poetry, of creation, and comes neither out of sun nor moon nor any kind of light, but from darkness.

What is this "well"? Is it the unknowable? As a poet who writes often about light, Levertov offers us this puzzling image to work with. As a spiritual seeker, even at sixteen, "moonbathing" did not change her as she wished; but when she allowed herself back into the well of the unknown darkness, she was renewed. The "Old Gods" which take over in so much of Levertov's vision, as she describes them in "Death in Mexico," are "obdurate, blind, all-seeing." They "admit / no regret" and "bitterness is irrelevant."

Perhaps one of the reasons no one has noticed that this clergyman's daughter has really been writing religious poetry all these years is that she has always spoken an orthodox Christianity of love while simultaneously offering this vision of the attractive yet terrible dark world of the "Old Gods." Sometimes it is the real world of the "dark morning" Levertov has to return to after the light ecstasy of experiencing the snake, sometimes it is the unfathomable cruelty of war or disease; sometimes it is only sleep, and sometimes it is the stone stairway to the spiritual itself, the Jacob's Ladder. Her ambivalence tests the reader, must constantly puzzle the reader. Is this darkness the unknown? Or God? Or the opposite of God? Is moonbathing a failed spiritual exercise but still necessary? Is the "dark morning" beautiful, or only inevitable?

The vision of a marriage of body and spirit is what allows Levertov to move beyond her politics, her Christian morality and most of all her Romantic fear of the darkness. Levertov offers earth images, Dionysian images, of fertility coming from the buried seed, the physical not the spiritual. "In Memory: After a Friend's Sudden Death," quoted at the beginning of this essay, continues

And I will speak
not of her work, her words, her search
for a new pathway, her need

to heedfully walk and sing through dailiness
noticing stones and flowers,

but of the great encompassing Aah! she would utter,
entering slowly, completely, into the welcoming whirlpool.

This is the whirlpool of the redwood sauna, but it is also the attraction of the snake, or the darkness at the bottom of a well, which allows renewing sleep.

Like Whitman, Levertov implies that "to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier"; these scenes of darkness, as we fall from the Garden into the possibly dangerous world, are irresistible—like the snake, "glinting arrowy / gold scales," with "the weight of you on my shoulders, / and the whispering silver of your dryness / … close at my ears—" which will give her enough pleasure to face "the dark morning." And it is this interaction between the light (the world of breath) and the dark (the refreshment of nothingness, or the water at the bottom of the well) which makes Levertov's mystical vision a religious one. For her, God is the author of paradoxes.

Like Whitman, Levertov's religion is the religion of self, but a cosmic self whose God or approach to God comes through the marrying of body and spirit. It is the human hand that holds God's hazelnut and, as Lady Julian does, understands the immensity of God's love. Like Lady Julian, Levertov refuses to be confounded by war and the darkness of human misery; she tries, as in "The Well," to see it as a source of rest. Her struggle is Lady Julian's struggle, and Job's, to understand God in order to be able to accept contradiction.

In the title poem of The Jacob's Ladder (1961), Levertov wrote "The stairway is not / a thing of gleaming strands … It is of stone." In the poem, the angels are on the stone steps, brushing their wings against her. In the same collection there is an earlier poem, also called "The Well." In that poem "the Muse" wades into dark water, and Levertov finds the word "water" spelled out on her left palm. The purpose of Levertov's long journey as a poet and a spiritual being has been to learn how to "breathe the water," the "water" written earlier on her palm, the water of life, of baptism; how to understand the darkness of the forest she must return to after sensing the beauty of the snake around her neck or bathing in moonlight. It is the fusion of these two that has always been the goal of Levertov's vision: to find a God in this intermingling of flesh and spirit, something, as she says in "Variation and Reflection on a Poem by Rilke," which will "let you flow back into all creation."