God And The Imagination

I make no apology for posting again on my blog this wonderful concluding paragraph from one of Denise Levertov's essays...

This acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. 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.

DENISE LEVERTOV A Poet's View

The following poems I've also posted before, and I love them. They mean so much to me. No call for analysis or interpretation: I feel it would diminish the magic of their brief but eternal beauty, their clarity, their mystery, their truth, their numinous presence. For me, poetry doesn't get much better than this.

Of Being

I know this happiness
is provisional:

           the looming presences -
           great suffering, great fear -

           withdraw only
           into peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves;

this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:

this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
                          this mystery:

DENISE LEVERTOV Oblique Prayers


Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

DENISE LEVERTOV The Sorrow Dance