The Gospel of John and Denise Levertov – a So Far Private Conversation.

I've written more than once on this blog about my attachment to the Gospel of John, and my debt to some of the great commentators 'on this most mystical of the Gospel narratives'. One of the Oh My Goodness moments in my research in the papers of James Denney was coming across an entire series of lectures on the Gospel of John. At the time I didn't have either the time or energy to read them; they lie in New College, and they may be of no great moment, though it was James Denney who wrote them, and I'd be surprised if they weren't well worth exploring.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. On page 195 of her biography of Levertov, Greene almost incidentally mentions that during a month when she couldn't write poetry Levertov wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John. Yes, Levertov on John, a manuscript apparently too long for publication. One of the leading poets of our time, whose patron saint was Thomas Didymus, whose religious inheritance included Hasidic Judaism, Anglican parents and her recently embraced Roman Catholic faith, at a key moment of questioning and discovery on the borderlands of faith, produced a handwritten commentary on the Gospel of John.And written by someone whose poetry, letters, essays and lectures demonstrate the power of words to move, fire imagination and persuade.

Somewhere in an archive box at Stanford University, there are some notebooks that if they were ever published would make the most remarkable reading. Levertov in conversation with the Fourth Evangelist would bring two poets, two seekers and two scintillatingly complex personalities together, sparking lights and glints of truth off each other, exegeting the Word made flesh, pointing to those flashes of recognition, as the Light that lightens every human being comes into the world as word again. I can't think how I'd ever have the chance to read Levertov on John. But in a strange way I found it a gladdening thought that a favourite poet would invest such thoughtfulness on a text that uses the images and stories of human life such as give value and poignant fittingness to the themes of her own best work. Maybe just knowing that she wrote that commentary, and it was comfort and guidance at a time when much was uncertain and she was looking, not for certainty but for that which would hold her.