The combination of harmony and flow … defines Levertov's books of the 1980s: Candles in Babylon, Oblique Prayers, and Breathing the Water. As if in momentary completion of the directions of her life's work, Levertov develops her vision of the mysteries of human experience into a statement of religious conviction and faith. As she explained in an article in 1984, "A Poet's View," in Religion and Intellectual Life [No. 1, Summer, 1984]:

all, in the creative act, experience mystery. The concept of "inspiration" presupposes a power which enters the individual and is not a personal attribute; and it is linked to a view of the artist's life as one of obedience to a vocation. David Jones wrote in one of his essays of the artist's impulse to gratuitously set up altars to the unknown god; and I alluded to the passage from what was then an agnostic standpoint. Later, that unknown began to be defined for me as God….

…. In the matter of religion … I have moved in the last few years … to a position of Christian belief…. [T]he movement has been … gradual and continuous….

When Levertov suggests [in "A Poet's View"] that "acknowledgment, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings," she presents a position "which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience." Because she considers "Imagination the chief of human faculties," she concludes that

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 evidences, 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….

Levertov's ambitious long poem, "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus" [in Candles in Babylon], offers the clearest view of the force of her new beliefs. The figure of the Apostle Thomas, the doubting Thomas of the Gospel According to John, is in many ways an ideal choice to reveal the nature of Levertov's faith. For in making demands for physical proof of Jesus' resurrection, confirming his belief only after declaring his incredulity, he drew forth the crucial response which illuminates the gospel and seems to underlie Levertov's poem: "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe" (John 20.29).

A basic given of Levertov's six-part poem is that individuals "live in terror / of what [they] know," imagining "death, death, and the world's / death." But they live in greater terror "of what [they] do not know, / in terror of not knowing." Yet as the poet declares in the opening "Kyrie" section of her "Mass," her plea for mercy, "our hope lies" precisely "in the unknown, / in our unknowing." Applying Thomas's lesson, those who are not able to comprehend the force that flows through the world, but are aware of it, must believe its presence and power nonetheless. Thus Levertov moves her reader from the prayer that the "deep, remote unknown, /… / Have mercy upon us" to a hymn of appreciation in her second section, "Gloria." Here she bids her audience: "Praise / … the unknown" which:

She offers praise for "flow and change," for "night and / the pulse of day."

At the middle of her poetic liturgy, Levertov presents her own "Credo" in place of the Nicene Creed, clarifying further her complex faith and its relationship to the example of the Apostle Thomas:

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.

…. .

… I believe and
interrupt my belief with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
belovèd, threatened world.

The "Sanctus" that follows, Levertov's naming of all that is holy, hymns the God-given human power of imagination to comprehend harmonies even while admitting anxiety and doubt. Here, with a bell-like ringing chant of praise, "sanctus, hosanna, sanctus," the poet proclaims the importance of "all that Imagination / has wrought, has rendered," all the varied forms of God and religion it has named and made in the effort to grasp "the Vast Loneliness" of the world, comprehending it, shaping it in the process, giving it "a hearth, a locus" and thereby making it manageable. As the poet exclaims, "all the gods, / angels and demigods, eloquent animals, oracles, / storms of blessing and wrath," products of the imagination "striving, in throes of epiphany—/ naming, forming," all

send forth their song towards
the harboring silence, uttering
the ecstasy of their names, the multiform
name of the Other, the known
Unknown, unknowable….

For Levertov, as her "Benedictus" suggests, "Blesséd is that which comes in the name of the spirit, / that which bears / the spirit within it." The spirit is in "that which utters / its being," in anyone who, seeking to comprehend the world, finds a self. Perhaps it exists most prominently in the artist's commitment and vision, her ability to find words which begin to express human limit and achievement. "The word," Levertov reminds her readers, "chose to become / flesh. In the blur of flesh / we bow, baffled," humbled before the magic of transubstantiation and before inevitable frailties. After all, perhaps weaknesses are saving strengths. The capacity to doubt and fret and love gathers not in omnipotence, but in hard-earned conviction. Man is willing both to give over to an awesome power and to offer "something human"—the power of caring—to "shield" the "Lamb of God," which is thereby revealed to him in the very act of compassion and engagement.

In the different parts of her "Mass," and throughout Candles in Babylon, Levertov affirms struggle, hope, a capacity for imaginative vision—the mortal capabilities that enable us to grasp and reach toward the immortal. "For that the vision / was given to me," she declares: "to know and share, / passing from hand to hand, although / its clarity dwindles in our confusion" ("The Many Mansions"). Levertov feels that the poet's capacity to see and express coherence in the commonplace and beyond it reveals "the amulet of mercy" to a troubled world, calming confusion without denying it. Having borrowed again from John for the title of this last poem in Candles in Babylon, Levertov confirms for those whose faith is not easy that there are indeed "Many Mansions" in God's "house," places for all manner and degrees of belief.

Despite such confirmation, however, Levertov is propelled at times by her conflict of belief and doubt into a troubling neutral zone of the spirit, not a "profound dark / night of the soul," but a gray "place / without clear outlines" ("Oblique Prayers," [from the collection Oblique Prayers]). To this, she responds with a book of Oblique Prayers (1984). Seeking to retain a vision of "the blessed light that caressed the world" before she "stumbled into / this place of mere / not-darkness," the poet organizes her book into four sections that define the threatening darkness and grayness, and embrace the brightness of faith. In the first sections, she moves the reader through what is by now familiar territory. She provides "Decipherings" of the routines, stresses, and hopes of daily experience in places as disparate as London and Ohio. Too, she offers insight into the various ways individuals are "Prisoners" of violent history in Lebanon or El Salvador. By way of immediate response, in the final two sections she explores the nature "Of God and of the Gods" with her own spiritual speculations and with her translations of fourteen poems by Frenchman Jean Joubert, with whom she has powerful sympathies of sound, sight, and spirit….

[Like] Joubert's spirituality, Levertov's often seems centered on perceptions of man in relation to the natural world. But though Levertov is sympathetic to his revelation of man's place in nature's design, her final section of Oblique Prayers reveals a faith that is more directly Christian than pantheistic. As she has said in an interview [with Joan F. Hallisey in Sojourners: An Independent Christian Monthly, February, 1986], "Maybe my Christianity is unorthodox, but it's still a Christian unorthodoxy." In the poem "This Day," Levertov reflects upon a time in which she takes communion, tastes "Dry wafer, / sour wine." One might expect the ritual enactment of sharing simply to confirm order, but the poet finds herself, rather, peering more deeply into confusion:

This day I see

God's in the dust,
not sifted

out from confusion.

As an artist and an observer of the world, Levertov seeks a resolution to her bewilderment in both everyday sights and in the world of art as these reveal points of entry into spiritual understanding. Even commonplaces seem fraught with a peculiar melodrama, reflecting the speaker's state of mind. Passing a duckpond she notes the swirl of confusion in what might seem to be a calm scene. The small pool seems a microcosm of larger disruptions, "brilliantly somber water / deranged by lost feathers and bits of / drowning bread." Perhaps, though, the poet ponders, "these imperfections" are inseparable from a more satisfying whole:

are part of perfection,
a pristine nuance? our eyes,
our lives, too close to the canvas,
enmeshed within
the turning dance,
to see it?

If everyday scenes themselves seem to capture an essential blend of comfort and discomfort, confusion and design, art offers even more explicitly "a visible quietness" amidst anxiety and doubt. Meditating later in the poem upon realistic "Dutch 17th-century paintings," Levertov marks the ways they represent the civilizing impact of human activities upon life's disharmonies, observing in the paintings "the concord / of lute and harpsichord" and the repose of "a smiling conversation" that generates and represents "calme, luxe" in a domestic interior. But she notes, too, in a question that seems to be answered in the very fact of its utterance, that the orderly calm extends far beyond the idea that civilized activities can tame disorder and disharmony. The Dutch artists, it appears, revealed harmony in the most common objects of their worlds as well as in the objects that civilized arts and artifices might transform:

… also the clutter
of fruit and herbs, pots, pans, poultry,
strewn on the floor: and isn't
the quiet upon them too, in them and of them,
aren't they wholly at one with the wonder?

For Levertov, the "wonder," whether found in nature or in art, reflects the full range of experiences. On "This Day" of sacrament Levertov has come to see "the world, a word / intricately incarnate" which "offers— / … / what hunger craves." She finds a faith which, refusing to deny confusion or difference, acknowledges both the common and the transcendent, and enables the individual to be "at one with the wonder" in all its disturbing and invigorating variety.

Levertov ends Oblique Prayers with three radiantly confident poems of gratitude and praise. Simply and directly she celebrates connection, a "happiness" which though "provisional" is accompanied by "An awe so quiet / I don't know when it began." Accepting without qualification her need to create and to be part of the whole fabric of a larger creation, "this need to dance, / this need to kneel: / this mystery" ("Of Being",) Levertov, after a long pilgrimage of commitment and belief, discovers "A gratitude / had begun to sing in me." With biblical echoes, resonance, and rhetoric, she declares in "Passage," the book's final poem, the truth of her own long passage as a poet. She recognizes that a spirit of holiness is made manifest in the many surfaces of the perceptible world. It spins space and time together into an intricate fabric and brightens our gaze. All of living creation is engaged and defined by the force of it. "The spirit that walked upon the face of the waters," Levertov writes, "walks the meadow of long grass; / green shines to silver where the spirit passes":

The grasses numberless, bowing and rising, silently
cry hosanna as the spirit
moves them and moves burnishing

over and again upon mountain pastures
a day of spring, a needle's eye
space and time are passing through like a swathe of silk.

In one of her earliest books Levertov proclaimed the special magic of the poet's relation to the natural world by hinting that in her presence readers might go Overland to the Islands (1958). Now, almost thirty years later, more comfortable than ever in her role as a magician with words, she suggests further that in the world she imagines most things are possible, even Breathing the Water (1987).

Levertov's final volume to date is a wonderfully made book of reconstructions and transformations. Making old material new, the poet looks back to earlier poems and subjects, and again uses as a springboard the work of Rilke. She discovers new inspirations as well, meditating upon a religious painting by Spaniard Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), reshaping a moment of early Christian poet Caedmon's history as recounted by the medieval English scholar Bede, and "spinning off verse based on photographs by Peter McAfee Brown, a letter by contemporary religious poet Thomas Merton, a sermon by Father Benignus in Stanford, California. In some of the finest lyrics of the book, Levertov offers readings of pieces of Englishwoman Julian of Norwich's fourteenth-century book of divine revelations or Showings. Throughout Breathing the Water, in an effort to reveal the interrelationship of physical life and spiritual, Levertov demonstrates the transforming power of the poet's imagination over both literary and natural objects.

Her book begins and ends with poems that are variations on themes found in Rilke's Book of Hours. These two transformations, together with a third that appears very near the end of Breathing the Water, form a kind of frame around the whole, illuminating Levertov's subjects, intentions, and techniques. Taking off from the poems that inspired them, the verses offer meditations, extensions, commentaries, upon the originals. Introducing a 1960 edition of Rilke's Selected Works, translator J. B. Leishman gave a useful explanation of the origin of book 1 of the The Book of Hours, the meditations of a Russian monk. Paraphrasing and quoting from Rilke's letter of May 14, 1911, to Marlise Gerding, "who had presumably asked him in what sense it was to be regarded as 'religious'," Leishman wrote:

He declared that, at a time when he was occupied with other tasks, words, "prayers, if you like", suddenly began to come to him…. The act of writing them down strengthened and summoned inspiration…. Rilke then proceeds to declare that all piety is either inexplicable or indifferent to him that does not contain something of invention, and that, for him, our relationship to God presupposes a certain "creativity", a certain "inventive genius."

Sharing the conviction that exercise of the imagination defines in large measure one's relationship with God, Levertov applies her own "inventive genius" to the observations and declarations of Rilke's monk. She acknowledges and celebrates man's creative relationship to nature. Sharpening the softly suggestive music of Rilke's symbolist musings, where sounds rather than statements or objects convey meaning, Levertov firmly places the spiritual in the physical. Instead of shimmering implications she offers solid architectural substance, articulating a world both concrete and transcendent.

Consider the first poem in Breathing the Water along with its source. The first stanza of the first poem of The Book of Hours, the piece Levertov selected for her initial "Variation on a Theme by Rilke," vibrates with elusive moods and meanings:

With strokes that ring clear and metallic, the hour
to touch me bends down on its way:
my senses are quivering. I feel I've the power—
and I seize on the pliable day.

By contrast, Levertov's poem describes the moment more directly and in detail, though meaning remains suggestive:

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.

Rilke's unspecified setting, a philosophic hovering in time and space, has become a specific, albeit still somewhat generalized, incident of vision. It happens on "A certain day" at a precise time—"the height of noon"—when "sky, air, light" gather together to reveal in their energy and harmony a presence or "being" in the world that is larger than an individual self. The poem's active, almost violent, diction ("struck," "sword," "blow," "rang out, metallic") suggests the power of the vision, and the completeness of the surrender to it. But even the images of confrontation and battle depict control as well as the release of highly charged energy. The speaker is struck by the wonder of the day, not destructively, but "as if with / the flat of a sword" in some chivalric ritual of design and order "granting … / honor and a task" of enabling others to share the vision of wholeness. In the moment, Levertov discovers that the sense of outer coherence, confidence, and force, radiates equally from within, a spirit that flows through all creation, heard in the ringing of "The day's blow" and in the poet's "whole self" "singing … I can."

The precise nature of the poet's visionary "task" is further elaborated in the second of Levertov's variations on a theme by Rilke. Placed late in Breathing the Water, her response to book 1, poem 4 of The Book of Hours serves as a kind of summation of the role of the artist as a perceiver and communicator of divine mystery in the natural world. Whereas Rilke's monk cautiously announces human limit in representing images of the divine in nature, stressing restriction and control as primary functions of perception, Levertov's speaker suggests an opening out of the spirit and imagination, accenting once again the correlation of individual insight and the world outside the self. "We dare not paint you at our own dictation," Rilke's cleric observes of the "maiden-dawn from whom the morning grew." Trusting neither their senses nor their individual capacities for accurate perception, Rilke's observers gather representations "From pigments of an older generation," "those strokes, the same irradiation / with which long since the saint secreted you." Although reverence for the works and images of past masters is in some sense an affirmation of achievement and continuity, it suggests here, too, a failure of confidence and an unwillingness to respond with eye and emotion to the wonder before one. With vision "open to [their] hearts," some choose instead to veil their sight:

We've built up images like walls before you,
till now you're hemmed with thousands of ramparts.
For to your veils our pious hands restore you
whenever you are open to our hearts.

But for the monk who speaks in Levertov's "Variations on a Theme by Rilke (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 4)" art offers a multiplicity of truths, each image opening a way into the comprehension of the divine. The austere simplicity of the Christ of fourteenth-century Italian painter Giotto, the softer radiance of fifteenth-century Dutch master Van Eyck's, the graphic realism of Dutchman Rembrandt's in the seventeenth century, the expressive sadness and harsh anger of Frenchman Georges Rouault's darkly lined modernist vision in the twentieth century, are all "true":

not one is a fancy, a willed fiction,
each of them shows us exactly
the manifold countenance
of the Holy One, Blessed be He.

Images of God change as men and perspectives change, and the imagination, embracing multiplicity, keeps the reader in touch with the moving spirit.

Levertov's monk suggests, further, that more functional architectural art, designed to erect changeless monuments to faith, reveals the interactive nature of spirituality that links inner worlds to outer, individuals to a grand design. Considering the structures men build in the name of religion, Levertov envisions not the restrictive walls and ramparts in Rilke's verse, but manmade constructions that release space and collapse protective barriers. After all, her speaker ponders rhetorically, "[aren't both] The seraph buttress flying / to support a cathedral's external walls" and "the shadowy ribs of the vaulted sanctuary / … equally … / the form of a holy place?"

The interfusion of interior spaces and exterior ones is perhaps most visible in the play of light through the "ruby / and celestial sapphire" of church windows which "can be seen / only from the inside, but then / only when light enters from without." The patterns individuals shape to express connection with the Infinite must wait upon the uncontrollable movement of natural forces to reveal their intensity, express their completeness. The makers of art cannot dominate their forms but must be receptive to the changing external shape of things, which will inevitably affect their creations. Levertov makes clear that all true artists are linked through time to their fellows. Yet more important still is the recognition that man's creativity is dependent upon God's:

From the divine twilight, neither dark nor day,
blossoms the morning….
… Thus the Infinite
plays, and in grace
gives us clues to His mystery.

Levertov's "Variation and Reflection on a Theme by Rilke (The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 7)" also gives the reader "clues." This last poem of the book sounds a cautionary note, urging him to recognize the necessity for a kind of negative capability, the capacity to remain open to a spiritual experience that will not be delimited despite the reader's powerful formal urge toward closure and completion. Though restless, readers must recognize that they can neither abandon nor solve "His mystery." Clarifying and elaborating upon Rilke's abstract reflection that one might gratefully discover harmony in the world "If only stillness reigned, pure, elemental," Levertov explains what such quiet might entail. Freed from the fretfulness of daily action and thought that keeps one bustling, bound up in "casual events," one might discover the power of the human mind to shape a kind of cosmic coherence. No longer yoked to "the swing of cause and effect," men might be gods, moving beyond themselves to conquer and control their environments. "If just for once," Levertov writes, "the swing of cause and effect, / cause and effect, / would come to rest":

then my thought, single and multifold,
could think you into itself
until it filled with you to the very brim,
bounding the whole flood of your boundlessness:
and at that timeless moment of possession,
fleeting as a smile, surrender you
and let you flow back into all creation.

But offering a "Reflection" as well as a "Variation" on Rilke, Levertov suggests that such absolute calm is not only impossible for humans, but inappropriate and even undesirable, for it falsifies the human condition. And yet, although "There will never be that stillness," lives are charged with the gleam of a visionary grandeur:

Humankind is laved in light, clear sight, and energy, as well as in the frustrating realization of human limit. The poet suggests that "What we desire travels with us"; and man the adaptable animal, alive in a world of change, "must breathe time as fishes breathe water." Accepting the flow as his natural element, moving with it rather than being defeated by it, he will see with the poet a spiritual plan, realizing that in our very restlessness "God's flight circles us."