Eidolon

The final poem of Levertov's I'll cite is, once again, evocative of Rilke. 

Variation on a Theme by Rilke

(The Book of Hours, Book I, #15)

With chips and shards, rubble of being,
we construct
                    not You but our hope of You.
We say - we dustmotes in the cosmos -
'You dome, arching above us!':
as if You were the sanctuary
by which we seek to define You.

Our cities pulverize, proud technologies
spawn catastrophe. The jaws of our inventions
snap down and lock.
                                Their purpose will be forgotten;
Time is aeons
and we live in minutes,
flies on a windowpane.

Who can conceive the span of You,
great vault, ribbed cauldron slung beneath the abyss,
cage of eternity?

Metaphors shatter, mirrors of poverty.

But something in us, while the millenia
monotonously pass
                              and pass,
hungers to offer up
our specks of life as fragile tesserae
towards the vast mosaic - temple, eidolon;

to be, ourselves, imbedded in its fabric,
as if, once, it was from that we were broken off.

Levertov tries to use language to capture some small inkling of the Divine (not You but our hope of You - even the hope of the Divine is almost impossible to construct with our inadequate language and imagination, let alone the Divine itself). This process is difficult, but Levertov carries on nevertheless. She admits metaphors shatter when faced with the span of You, yet she continues with her poem, with her metaphors, as these are all she has: great vault, ribbed cauldron slung beneath the abyss, / cage of eternity?

She notes in apocalyptic fashion the insubstantiality of human empires and the destructive power of some modern technologies (Levertov was a passionate anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigner), and is acutely aware of how small and feeble we are in the context of Time and the Universe.

Yet those wonderful last two stanzas reinforce the human hunger and hope we all have, the leitmotif which runs through all of Levertov and Rilke: even if our specks of life are mere fragile tesserae, we long for wholeness and to be a part (again?) of the vast mosaic.

Through a transforming imagination we can find a path (unclear as it may be) to spirit; poetry (and prayer) can provide a link - weak as it may be - to the inexpressible mystery.   

I Am, I Can

Ring them bells so the world will know / That God is one BOB DYLAN Ring Them Bells

Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent Earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.  

RILKE The Sonnets To Orpheus (translated by Joanna Macy)

Variation on a Theme by Rilke

(The Book Of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)

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.

DENISE LEVERTOV Breathing The Water

Denise Levertov wrote several poems with the title Variation On A Theme By Rilke, and I thought it might be interesting to pair one of them with a Rilke poem (not the one from The Book Of Hours which directly influenced this Variation, but the last sonnet from The Sonnets To Orpheus.) As you can see, there are some striking correspondences.

The image of the bell is central to both poems, and each poem ends with a declarative I am or I can. Rilke's poem is set at night, Levertov's by day - which is rather neat, as the symbolic resonance of the bell itself unifies all polarities: the bell summons us to both contemplative prayer and interrogative reflection, to both mourning and celebration; and is therefore an audible marker of both joy and sorrow, life and death, day and night.

Rilke's sonnet contains the idea that suffering is an inevitable, indeed necessary part of life. We are all bells rocking this way and that, buffeted by life. And the bruising clapper of the bell strikes us painfully but resoundingly awake. There's also the idea that this transformative experience is not some random event we have to await passively, but that we can influence events ourselves by moving back and forth, by turning ourselves to wine, by saying to the silent earth: I flow. The wonderful, self-willed assertion of I am at the end of the poem affirms the meaning, importance and ultimate wholeness of our individual existence - despite the enigmatic silence of nature and the indifference of the rest of the world.

Levertov's own poem contains a similar idea - though her transformation of self seems to be more an awakening to a whole self that was already there: less self-willed, and more the result of the action of an outside agency, granted as if with / the flat of a sword.    

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

Dragonfly Blue

Poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us. UNKNOWN

To Rilke

Once, in a dream,
                               the boat
pushed off from the shore.
You at the prow were the man -
all voice, though silent - who bound
rowers and voyagers to the needful journey,
the veiled distance, imperative mystery.

All the crouched effort,
          creak of oarlocks, odor of sweat,
          sound of waters
          running against us
was transcended: your gaze
held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue
restored to us
                         a shimmering destination.

I had not read of your Nile journey,
the enabling voice
drawing that boat upstream in your parable.
Strange that I knew
your silence was just such a song.

DENISE LEVERTOV A Door In The Hive

To Rilke is the very first poem in Denise Levertov's 1989 collection, A Door In The Hive. Just a few thoughts that occur to me...

Rilke was a keen traveller, visiting France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandanavia and North Africa. He actually did make a trip up the Nile - in a felucca with sixteen oarsmen. During this time he immersed himself in Egypt's culture and mythology, and his fascination with the Egyptian cult of the dead became a major influence behind his great work, Duino Elegies.

In traditional Nile boats the man in the prow would 'sing' from time to time - it was a kind of unearthly, wordless vocalisation - and this 'song' was supposed to assist the boat upstream in its battle against the current. Hence the enabling voice. But Levertov, in her poem, makes a connection between the Nile 'singer' and Rilke in the prow of her dream-boat. Just like the prow-singer's voice, Rilke's voice - his poetic voice - is also enabling. This poetic voice can counter prevailing currents, can help us  see more clearly. This is the voice of the seer and the Romantic poet, the poet of Shelley's assertion that Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

However, there is one important difference. Unlike the prow-singer's voice, the Rilkean voice of Levertov's dream is silent. And Rilke's gaze seems even more eloquent than his silence: ... your gaze / held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue / restored to us / a shimmering destination. (By the way, how wonderful that dragonfly blue: the one transforming streak of colour - and how necessary and uplifting that splash of colour - in this misty, mysterious, toiling dream-world.)

Perhaps Rilke's voice is silent because poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us? Perhaps his silent voice speaks of his creative, interior transformation of the world - it's his inner voice? Perhaps this is the still, silent voice of God? (Or of Orpheus having left his lyre at home that day?) Whatever our interpretation - of course, his voice is not silent. It sings.

I cannot read this poem without thinking of the mythical Charon ferrying souls across the river Styx from the Earth to the Underworld. Or of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha working with the ferryman Vasudeva and gaining enlightenment from the river.

And that mystical blue keeps flashing before my eyes... Blue, the colour of German Romanticism, symbol of love and desire, the infinite and the unreachable...

Through A Glass, Darkly

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.

RILKE The First Elegy from Duino Elegies (translated by EDWARD SNOW)

Where Is The Angel?

Where is the angel for me to wrestle?
No driving snow in the glass bubble,
but mild September.

Outside, the stark shadows
menace, and fling their huge arms about
unheard. I breathe

a tepid air, the blur
of asters, of brown fern and gold-dust
seems to murmur,

and that's what I hear, only that.
Such clear walls of curved glass:
I see the violent gesticulations

and feel - no, not nothing. But in this
gentle haze, nothing commensurate.
It is pleasant in here. History

mouths, volume turned off. A band of iron,
like they put round a split tree,
circles my heart. In here

it is pleasant, but when I open
my mouth to speak, I too
am soundless. Where is the angel

to wrestle with me and wound
not my thigh but my throat,
so curses and blessings flow storming out
and the glass shatters and the iron sunders?

DENISE LEVERTOV A Door In The Hive

Inspired by the current readings in A Year With Rilke, I thought it might be illuminating to explore a little the relationship between Rilke and Denise Levertov - in my view one of the finest, profoundest, most spiritually questing American poets of the last century. She's on record as considering Rilke her mentor, and many of her poems bear direct or indirect testament to this.

The angel in the poem above is recognisably Rilke's angel. (The title of the 1989 poetry collection from which it comes, A Door In The Hive, is undoubtedly an allusion to Rilke's notion of 'The Bees of the Invisible': We are the bees of the invisible. We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible. RILKE)

Far be it from me to give - or even to be able to give - an in-depth analysis of this poem, but here are some freewheeling thoughts and impressions written quickly and 'on the hoof'.

Where is Levertov here? It seems she could be in her car, stuck in the driving snow. But perhaps this glass bubble could also be a house - or even her body, or any 'safe' constructed world? (I'm reminded at once of Paul Simon's song, The Boy In The Bubble.)

There's no doubt that the world outside this bubble is uneasily threatening, violent even. Inside the bubble it's tepid, safe, but, to a great extent, cut off from feeling and a harsher yet more splendid reality. Inside it's a more pallid, altogether different order of existence (nothing commensurate). The whole world of history is out there, but its cries are muted (volume turned off).

In a further analogy of alienation, imprisonment and non-participation, Levertov likens herself to a split tree with a band of iron around it. This suggests perhaps the division of the human psyche, the mind/body duality of Descartes, the divorcing of reason and emotion, the mind and the spirit, the mundane/temporal and the eternal/divine.

Within this bubble world she is speechless. She wants to speak, but no sound is uttered. She wants to speak, but, in her present position, no angel comes to wrestle with her, to free her voice. And if that angel came, she says, it would be a wounding, physical, visceral encounter - but an encounter so momentous, so all-encompassing, so full of both curses and blessings (the two polarities absolutely essential to the whole of experience, the joy and the despair, the heaven and hell) that it would shatter the glass, break the iron bond, and release her into the whole, into reality, into creativity, into - ecstasy?

I would be really interested in anyone else's response to this extraordinary poem. 

Heron Priest

The mention of herons in my poem yesterday set me thinking generally about herons in poetry. Immediately Dylan Thomas came to mind. Herons haunt several of his poems, but I suppose his most famous heron name check is in the heartstoppingly felicitous phrase mussel pooled and heron priested shore from one of his finest poems, Poem in October.

Next I thought of Denise Levertov and her 2 poems Heron (I) and Heron (II) from Evening Train. In one of these poems she describes the heron's legato arabesque of the neck. I know there are many other poems about herons or which reference herons in passing - and I'd love to hear from anyone who knows an especially beautiful heron poem. I myself once wrote a couple of yang and yin-type heron haiku, though I wouldn't single them out as of any particular literary merit:

heron priest
with pointed beak
penetrates fish hearts

but heron priestess
plumbs their souls
with piercing eyes

However what all this has been leading up to is a heron poem by the very fine Scottish lyrical-political-nature poet Sorley MacLean (1911-1996), who deserves to be much better known in England - and in the rest of the world. It's true that he wrote in Gaelic by choice, which could make him slightly inaccessible you might think - but I'm fairly sure that almost all his poems have been translated by himself very beautifully into English. Certainly his book of Collected Poems O Choille Gu Bearradh (From Wood To Ridge) - which I bought from a petrol station near Portree on the Isle of Skye a few years ago - has dual texts in both Gaelic and English side by side.

MacLean was born in 1911 off the coast of Skye on the small island of Raasay, where Gaelic was his first language. He went to the University of Edinburgh in 1929 and was wounded 3 times serving for the British Army in North Africa during WWII. Having rejected the teachings of Scottish Presbyterianism, he turned to the politics of the far left. One of the first poems he ever wrote was called A' Chorra-Ghridheach (The Heron). These are the last 3 stanzas:

What is my thought above the heron's?
The loveliness of the moon and the restless sea,
food and sleep and dream,
brain and flesh and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season without stint,
without sorrow, but with one delight,
the straight, unbending law of herons.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the glitter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.

What a wonderful, absolutely on-the-nail contrast between the instinctive, unreflecting, untroubled animal world and the opposite human domain. And remember, this is a translation, so much of its original, poetic glory is lost...

In conclusion I'd like to end with some of my favourite Sorley MacLean lines, the final 2 verses of his magnificent poem Coilltean Ratharsai (The Woods Of Raasay):

There is no knowledge of the course
of the crooked veering of the heart,
and there is no knowledge of the damage
to which its aim unwittingly comes.

There is no knowledge, no knowledge,
of the final end of each pursuit,
nor of the subtlety of the bends
with which it loses its course.

Many thanks to Loren Webster for letting me use his superb heron photo.

Celebrating The Mystery

I can't praise Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992) highly enough. The collection contains 25 simply stunning essays of literary criticism and writings on the creative imagination and the poetic process. Really you have to read the whole essay to understand fully what she means, but Levertov says this about mystery and imagination in concluding A Poet's View:

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.

Levertov defines her poetic stance quite admirably and succinctly; I don't think I've ever read, except in Coleridge or Eliot, a better exposition of the subtle connections between logical intellect, mysterious imagination, faith and God.

The Enabling Voice

Recently Loren Webster has been writing about the poetry of Denise Levertov. I like the reflective, searching poems of Levertov very much, and am familiar with her Selected Poems which takes one up to 1982, and the collections Oblique Prayers (1984), A Door In The Hive/Evening Train (published both together in the one book by Bloodaxe in 1993), Sands Of The Well (1996) and her final posthumous collection This Great Unknowing (1999). I hesitate to call this last collection 'mystical' (though mystical it undoubtedly is) because as ever she flits restlessly from God to politics, and from landscape to social comment - with even a bit of humour thrown in.

Levertov is not a poet of anthology pieces, stand-out, stand-alone poems or killer one-liners. As Loren hints, it would be hard to recall a single poem of hers which memorably burns itself into the mind with scorching imagery or verbal pyrotechnics - like some of Sylvia Plath's poems, for instance. In a sense her work is rather more interesting than that. I think you've got to consider her total oeuvre, read a lot of it and let it gradually seep into your consciousness. It seems to me her poems are very much works in progress or works on a continuum. We travel with her from poem to poem, collection to collection, as she observes this, reflects on that, is light-hearted about this, deadly serious about that, feels anger and despair about war and the suffering of innocent people, and is always acutely tuned in to the world of the spirit. She does not set herself up as any kind of poetic seer or sage; instead she sincerely shares with us her own doubts and questions and reflections (which are often our own doubts and questions and reflections) and attempts to make sense of and clarify them. Some of her poems are quite clear and plain; others are mysterious and more 'difficult'. Just as life itself can be both simple and complicated. Sometimes both at the same time.

Since I've been talking myself about Rilke lately, here's Levertov's poem To Rilke from A Door In The Hive (the beehive was an important image for Rilke). I suppose this is one of her more mysterious and elusive poems. I think it's quite beautiful in its opaque clarity. It is dream-like, parable-like, and contains the paradox of voiceless speech or eloquent silence at its centre. (It helps to know a little about Rilke to understand the poem.)

To Rilke

Once, in dream,
the boat
pushed off from the shore.
You at the prow were the man -
all voice, though silent - who bound
rowers and voyagers to the needful journey,
the veiled distance, imperative mystery.

All the crouched effort,
creak of oarlocks, odor of sweat,
sound of waters
running against us
was transcended: your gaze
held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue
restored to us
a shimmering destination.

I had not read yet of your Nile journey,
the enabling voice
drawing that boat upstream in your parable.
Strange that I knew
your silence was just such a song.

The Red Salamander Moment Of The Now

I've been thinking about Denise Levertov this morning. Not long ago I quoted 2 poems from her lovely, meditative collection Oblique Prayers. From it this is another favourite of mine:

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:

For me there's a direct line of connection from this later poem right back to a poem of hers I also love which comes from the 1960s collection Sorrow Dance:

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.

As I write this and consider the 2 poems togther, I've just realised for the 1st time that both contain 13 lines and both have a similar title. There's a stillness, a sense of mystery and wonder, a spiritual awe permeating these simply written, translucent poems, a sense of gratitude and appreciation, which I find incredibly beautiful and life-enhancing. Levertov, and we the readers also, float into Creator Spirit's deep embrace in the red salamander moment of the now. And that moment becomes an eternal moment.

On my Camino pilgrimage late last year I saw a salamander on the edge of an ancient well as I walked between Estella and Los Arcos. It was vivid green and orange, and I'd never seen one before.

Perhaps we should not strive for Enlightenment - it's there for the experiencing at any given instant. Perhaps all-surrounding grace is there for the joyful taking - with no effort at all.

(The quotes float into Creator Spirit's deep embrace, all-surrounding grace and no effort are all taken from The Avowal - another poem in Levertov's Oblique Prayers.)

Dyadic

Brilliant Sky

Never between the branches has the sky
burned with such brilliance, as if
it were offering all of its light to me,
as if it were trying to speak to me,
to say - what? what urgent mystery
strains at that transparent mouth?
No leaf, no rustle . . . It's in winter,
in cold emptiness and silence, that the air
suddenly arches itself like this into infinity,
and glitters.
This evening, far from here,
a friend is entering his death,
he knows it, he walks
under bare trees alone,
perhaps for the last time. So much love,
so much struggle, spent and worn thin.
But when he looks up, suddenly the sky
is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

The End Of Summer

Time
which will
take us

we take
sometimes
by the tail

like a handsome blue
lizard which deftly
breaks itself off

For one wild moment
it gleams
between our fingers

2 poems by Jean Joubert, translated from the French by Denise Levertov and contained in her collection Oblique Prayers.