At what point does the overtly political become a more enclosing, less compartmentalized angst? Levertov's essays on Kim Chi Ha, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, and others, as well as her important 1960s and 1970s poem collections that were often described as "political," have prompted a great many of her readers to characterize her work in that way. Yet running concurrent with that perhaps more easily labeled theme has always been a pervasive spiritualism. [In Religion and Literature, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 1986)], Joyce Beck points to the '"natural supernaturalism' of her romantic poetics," her rearing as the child of a Church of England clergyman, and her ancestral roots in Judaism. Harry Marten finds Levertov's poems of the last ten years to be conclusive proof that the poet has become "increasingly convinced that the exercise of the imagination moves one toward faith" [Understanding Denise Levertov, 1988]. From her earliest writing to the most recent, Levertov has revealed her fused Christian and Hasidic beliefs in the joys of the immediate world, supporting the holistic "I" that is itself a part of the divine, as well as the compelling and nourishing community of shared belief.

Indeed, Martin Buber's I and Thou is probably one of the routes to Levertov's politics. The person actively involved must speak aggressively, for the purpose of her involvement is to effect change, to better the community, the polis. Even though Levertov in her early work was not influenced by Charles Olson—and tried to avoid the kind of mesmerizing contact with him that she had seen absorb her good friend Robert Creeley [according to a comment made by Levertov in 1963]—she shares with Olson his deep reverence for the good, the beneficial, the constructive, not in any platitudinous sense but with the most profound recognition of affinities among people, in their specific places. It is this reverence for the human body and spirit, for capabilities both mental and physical, that has marked Levertov's art. She cannot bear—literally—the fact that humankind keeps refusing its potentials for understanding, for greatness. She refuses to bear the fact that human beings become vessels of violence and degradation. And her refusal is often angry, vehement, strident—"political."

Levertov's poem "Continuum" from her 1978 collection Life in the Forest expresses that connecting, joining belief—both in human faith and in the anger that human beings' lapses from faith provoke. Another dimension of her sense of life as process, life as testing ground, is her belief that humankind draws from, and in turn sustains, the natural world. Many of her metaphors are drawn from nature, and many of her most effective allegories conjoin the natural and the human. "Continuum" begins with a description of a fragile part of the natural world, representative of the fragile voice of the commonplace poet:

Some beetle trilling
its midnight utterance.

Voice of the scarabee,
dungroller,
working survivor….

Hardly pretentious, this creator of voice is menial, hardworking, a survivor; and its voice "trills"—an unexpectedly aesthetic verb, given the rest of the description of the beetle—during the night. Never visible, then, because of the natural darkness, the creator makes his or her intentions known only through sound. Levertov's opening connects the reader to the epigraph for the entire book, the Henry James quotation that privileges the unheralded work of the artist: "We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion. Our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."

Levertov's opening description of the Kafkaesque dung beetle (surely we are meant to hear Gregor's voice from "The Metamorphosis" in that choice of noun, which also pays homage in an Egyptian sense to the earthly sacred) echoes James's passionate definition of the artist and expands that identity to include the larger community of people risking danger, separation from their culture, health, and perhaps madness in order to speak truthfully. In the central stanza of the short poem, Levertov speaks of herself as a parallel creating voice, assessing her years of travel and work in search of the knowledge that the beetle possesses innately:

Levertov's travels took her wherever there was human anguish, from Vietnam to Central America and the American South. Cities, hamlets, mountains, lakes—and yet in every case, her voyages became "flights" because they awakened her imaginative energy. She was never merely traveling: she was recreating the importance of what she saw before her. Of course, her work was "political." It charted the actual that she had seen. More importantly, it gave her material from which to create the philosophical themes of endurance, of the need for change, of the need to recognize humankind's sinister bent as well as its greatness. So from her own countless travels, she as poet returns to the quiet natural world—whether in Boston, Mexico, or Maine—where the simple, eternal dedication of the beetle keeps her singing truthfully.

The closing three-line stanza, which follows the description of the beetle or poet ("the same blind face upturned to the light"), or rather, of beetle/poet made one, both still singing an eternal song—"the one song"—describes a scene that draws together the dichotomies of nature: "the same weed managing / its brood of minute stars / in the cracked flagstone." Human effort—"managing"—rises above the evidence of damage and waste, "cracked flagstone," in order to sustain the "brood of minute stars." The product itself is diminutive—shaped to reasonable size but given the luster that Levertov's belief in the efficacy of art allows. From the simple, the primitive, the natural, comes brilliance, a word not in the poem but suggested through its near-rhyme with the opening word trilling. The whole experience is brought to a finish through the reflecting title, "Continuum." Year after year, travel after travel, seasonal happenings occur—for nature and for the poet—while the song, the "one song," goes on, changing slightly with events and with the singer's capacities, but forming a continuum, with no abrupt shifts or changes.

One of the ways Levertov has maintained the sense of continuity within her many poems is her constant voice. Her best poems work from the impulse of her natural voice, a slightly staged, quasi-British voice, speaking in a rhythm that demands—insists—that listeners attend to it. In its quietly emphatic way, Levertov's voice forces the reader to give full value to line arrangement, to the isolation of a few words in a line, so that the rhythms of the poet-persona's voice carry their meaning into the ear of the reader. The effect of Levertov's poetry is as much aural as it is visual. The reading process makes use of the visual in order to create the aural.

These segments of the reading process are interrelated because of the skill with which Levertov has written her poetry. Her principle of design is that line division signals pause and enjambment. Through visual design she creates a flow of voice that allows the reader to participate—to speak the poetry after her. She uses punctuation carefully, always meaningfully combined with line endings, so that the reader has ample information about where the meaning units of each poem lie. Once into "Continuum," for example, the reader is relieved that the second line ends with a period and therefore separates the opening couplet from the rest of the poem. The only other period occurs at the end of the poem. Through her punctuation, Levertov creates a two-part poem, rather than a six-stanza poem. The first two lines—the beetle singing—become the crystallizing image for the meaning of the rest of the poem.

The opening tercet of the longer part of the poem is obviously modifying the initial image, so it, too, is easy for the reader to apprehend. The ellipsis that follows gives another clear signal to the reader: these two segments are joined together, but they are also being fused with the body of the poem. The ellipsis acts as a glide, a verbal fall into the more matter-of-fact phrasing of the central segment, the heart of the poem—which also looks like the heart in its blocked appearance. There is a kind of assurance both in its simple shape and in the poet's use of the "I": "I recall how each year…." Rather than seeming egotistical, this statement exudes a tone of confidence (of course, reader, you will want to hear about my travels, and I assume the role of speaker so that you can rest into the role of hearer, the classic narration of journeys creating the traditional symbiosis of language and response.)

The reader is consequently compelled to listen, and to accept the seemingly more personal middle section of the poem as only another plane of the poet's expression. Juxtaposed with the visual description of the beetle, this section also tells us that life gives us experiences we need to express. And it is this knowledge that appears in the poem's shorter fourth division, which contains a description that can be applied to both the beetle and the poet. While the poignance of a "blind" face is clear, the metaphoric import of the sightless turning to the light is perhaps the most important statement the poet makes. Following instinct, the beetle trills, the blind face looks for light, the poet speaks, and the artistic product—"one song"—is the result of this untutored creativity. No matter what the world of humankind experiences, the drive of the artist—both natural and intellectual—is to reach for the positive, the light beyond the earthiness of the human.

Levertov's concluding image goes further than her opening one, which is humbly realistic except for the word trilling that foreshadows the artistic accomplishment to come. In the ending, even "weeds" can manage to affect life, faced with the problems of that enigmatic brood of stars.

"Continuum"—for all its brevity and modesty—becomes a key poem within Life in the Forest; it is the title of the second section of the book. By choosing to end this section with its title poem, Levertov emphasizes its importance. There are poems within the section—and within the collection as a whole—that question this expression of difficult faith, of the premise of continuity. In her poems about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about the misery in Chile in 1977, and about racist America, she uses nature to show the depletion of the human spirit. She is following the same process her beetle does as she recognizes the real and moves beyond it into her song. Her song fuses both acknowledgment of the real and the primacy of the ideal.

In Life in the Forest, as in all Levertov's collections, her arrangement of the poems is crucial. Each book must be read as a narrative of emotion if not of fact, and the poems that are placed at the opening and closing of each section—as of each collection—are particularly important to Levertov's oeuvre. Despite her attention to some overtly political themes in Life in the Forest, its organization shows the reader that it is not intended to be primarily a political book. It is more often a book about Levertov's mother—her life and death—and about Levertov's understanding of her mother and her mother's life, which had been given to nurturing, to gardening, to appreciating beauty and knowledge and music. Finally, it is also a book about Levertov's own coming to knowledge of herself as woman, a woman of the 1970s seen through the grid of her mother's life in Mexico in her nineties, the poet's memories of life in England, and her more recent history as a divorced American woman. Through her understanding of her mother's waning but wise life—at ninety, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-three—Levertov reaches toward the whole continuum of life experience.

Her more characteristic image for that understanding of life experience had been the sharing of language. In "Writing to Aaron," she encapsulates years of experience in a structure that questions its own possibility but affirms that their meaning to each other—and the story of their separate lives—existed in words. The poem closes: "The Word itself / is what we heard, and shall always hear, each leaf / imprinted, syllables in our lives." Art as aesthetic connection, human meaning as poetry: these were the stances Levertov developed in her poems. But much of Life in the Forest is physical rather than intellectual, and the poet writes in her Introductory Note that she has tried to follow the aesthetics of Cesare Pavese. What she admires about his poems is twofold: that they are "about various persons other than himself," and that his aim is "suggesting a narrative through the depiction of a scene, a landscape, rather than through direct recounting of events as such." The change in focus is clear.

Levertov's mother becomes an external persona used to break out of the autobiographical mode so common to contemporary poetry-—but the choice of her mother as subject, though natural and important, posed some problems for Levertov. Levertov had never been interested in being a "woman" poet, or—heaven forbid—a "poetess." She spoke frequently about the position of the gendered poet, always insisting that she be seen as poet, not woman poet. But the 1960s and 1970s brought new recognition of the valuable differences between men's and women's selves, and Levertov was absorbing those recognitions as she lived the life of a prominent woman poet during those decades. The crucible of her mother's death in 1977 seems to have brought her to yet another kind of realization of what women's lives could mean, however, so when she wrote the poems collected in this 1978 book, her attitude had been subtly changed by her own circumstances. Levertov's recognition of her poems as art created by a woman keeps one foot in her former stance. As she said in American Poetry [No. 1, 1984], she is first of all a poet: "I don't believe I have ever made an aesthetic decision based on my gender." Although she admits, "Obviously many of my poems … were written by a woman," she still insists that there is a difference between gender as aesthetic and gender as subject. "If a woman poet writes poems on what her female body feels like to her, what it's like to menstruate, to be sexually entered by a man, to carry and bear a child and breast-feed it, her subject matter derives directly from her gender; but it will be the structure of the poem, its quality of images and diction, its details and its totality of sounds and rhythms, that determines whether or not it is a poem—a work of art." And if it is a successful work of art, Levertov concludes, it will transcend a range of "inessential" factors—"including gender."

Much of Levertov's 1980s poetry tentatively refutes that intellectual position, because the core of her conviction as poet—and, recently, as poet of spiritual and mystical voice—stems from her involvement with her mother's life and death. The metaphor she chooses to express the fulfilling quality of her mother's life is itself a feminine one, that of the garden. Such a metaphor makes Levertov's poems about the mother/the feminine reach past gender into both the specific and natural, as well as the universal. In "A Daughter, II," Levertov creates the image of "a garden / of recognitions and revelations. Eden / of radiant comprehensions." She juxtaposes this external frame, in "A Daughter, I," with her memory of the mother—young and caring—as she longs

The several poems culminate in "Death in Mexico," a poem with a purposefully ambiguous title. Yes, her mother is dying. But contrary to the reader's expectation, Levertov emphasizes the death of her mother's garden—uncared for, unwatered: "three weeks before she died, the garden / began to vanish." Despite the fact that her mother had nurtured English and Welsh flowers in this Mexican location for twenty years, in less than a month the garden becomes "a greenish blur" complete with "weeds, flowerless rosebushes, broken stems of the canna lilies and amaryllis," hedged inside a rickety and broken fence. The destruction of her mother's garden becomes a means for the poet to lament her personal, inexpressible loss:

The grief that accrues from her mother's death shapes the later sections of Life in the Forest. One long sequential section, "Modulations for Solo Voice," traces the end of a love affair; more important, it establishes the paradigm of speaker and listener, voiced expression and unvoiced. The "one song" from "Continuum" becomes a forceful image in the later poems of this collection, so forceful that Levertov can close the book with the simple, runic "Magic," a poem that resonates in shape and language with the hum of "The brass or bronze cup, stroked at the rim, round and around." When the sound dies away, it is because the two listeners have ceased to respond to it. Throughout Levertov's poems, the inattentive hearer—or the hearer whose capacity to listen is marred or broken—constitutes a major disappointment, one sure cause of her grief.

The poet turns from this pervasive grief to the search for the light, often finding its radiance coupled with the song—both key images from "Continuum." As she writes in "A Pilgrim Dreaming," the poet can come to knowledge of herself:

By the fire light
of Imagination, brand
held high in the pilgrim's
upraised hand, he sees,
not knowing what boundaries it may have.

In Levertov's collections during the 1980s, the image of light intensifies, while grief—submerged and in some ways placated—becomes the means to that light. Candles in Babylon (1982), Oblique Prayers (1984), and Breathing the Water (1987) convey a deeper sense of Levertov's acceptance of a presence that defies rational understanding. The tone of much of this poetry resembles that of Levertov's

effective "A Woman Alone" from Life in the Forest. As the divorced woman faces her life separate from others, she learns to work her way toward individual wholeness. To choose—that is the essence of the poet's definition of living alone—to enjoy the great freedom of singleness, "her time / spent without counting the change." Levertov's spiritual quest seems to have followed the same patterns as her coming to terms with her self alone: realization, choice, commitment. While it is probably too soon to describe explicitly what her spiritual vision consists of, her readers have parts of that image in these last three collections of poems. Her six-part penultimate poem from Breathing the Water, "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416," is a powerfully satisfying expression of Levertov's most recent thematic concentration, the speaker's search for faith and vision.

As the title suggests, Julian's vision is the core of Levertov's poetic recreation of the miracle—of Julian's vision and her life. It begins with the concrete evidence of that vision, "a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe in God's pierced palm." Levertov's choice of the indefinite noun thing bears witness to her dedication to William Carlos Williams's "No ideas but in things," the battle cry of those imagists and objectivists of the twentieth century who have believed in the efficacy of the object. It also echoes natural speech, and one of the projects of her poem is to humanize the mystical process, to give life to Lady Julian of Norwich.

To that end, she describes Julian's choice not to marry, her learning, her naming—making the saint into a "real" woman ("Thirty was older than it is now," "Somehow, reading or read to, she'd spiralled up within tall towers of learning"). And her childhood becomes a part of Levertov's evocation, expressed again through lush if typical country images, their completeness tied to the full life of the saint as woman: "the dairy's bowls of clabber, of rich cream, / ghost-white in shade, and outside / the midsummer gold, humming of dandelions." When God appears to her, that expression is also given naturalness: God is imaged as both human father and, through the metaphor, human mother:

God's wounded hand
reached out to place in hers
the entire world, "round as a ball,
small as a hazelnut." Just so one day
of infant light remembered
her mother might have given
into her two cupped palms
a newlaid egg, warm from the hen;

Naturalness, ease of understanding, ease of expression, and acceptance of whatever miracle: these are the emphases of Levertov's poem about the mystical happenings. Accordingly, her diction itself becomes matter-of-fact, as tied to earth and fact as the description of the hazelnut:

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.

The horror of the rest of Lady Julian's story is understated, compressed into the last two poems, and set in our own times when the poet's voice reminds us,

She lived in dark times, as we do:
war, and the Black Death, hunger, strife,
torture, massacre. She knew
all of this, she felt it
sorrowfully, mournfully,
shaken as men shake
a cloth in the wind.

Her experiences were judged "delirium," "hallucination," but she persisted, and her final vindication gives Levertov the closing image for the poem—another crystallization of light and song that places Lady Julian in one of the highest positions in Levertov's "continuum" of moral greatness. Her readers have come to expect change and affirmation in Levertov's later poems, and these qualities are the touchstones for her future work. Through the particular to the universal, Levertov's intensely concrete and personalized poems take her readers to places, and visions, unexpected in both contemporary times and contemporary poems.