Suspended
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.
Denise Levertov "fulfills the eternal mission of the true Poet; to be a receptacle of Divine Grace and a 'spender of that Grace to humanity'". The words are from a review of one of Levertov's 24 volumes of poems. This slim collection of 38 poems gathers some of her more significantly religious poems. Her purpose in doing so was as a convenience to her readers "who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith.
The Stream and the Sapphire attempts " to some extent, to trace my slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as affirmation." What you hear in Levertov's poems on religious themes is an honest voice, hopeful rather than confident, faith in the interrogative mood, but with a substructure of thanksgiving and hopefulness evoking trust.
I first came across her in her collection of essays, The Poet in the World. She is nothing like as well known here as she is in North America, but those who hear her distinctive voice realise they are listening to someone who takes both poetry and life with utmost seriousness. In the title essay, 'The Poet in the World', she says,
"The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."
Poetry is vocation, a summons to truthfulness, a call to give voice to the mountain ranges and ocean depths and open skies of human experience. With that calling comes the responsibility to say what is seen, to hear what is said, and to interpret the world to the mind, the heart, the imagination and the conscience. And Levertov had no doubt conscience was crucial to poetry claiming to speak into human realities. She became a conscience-guided poet, a vocal protester and practitioner of social conscience and moral discernment in the world of politics, economics and scientific technology.
Her stance affected her popularity and drew criticism from the community of poets. Many of her poems were overtly and unabashedly political; the Vietnam war, covert American subversive activity in Central America, the nuclear arms race, war and militarism and the suffering of both soldiers and civilians in technologically efficient and morally indifferent warfare. Even before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Levertov was a passionate advocate for environmental care and proper curation of the earth's ecology. All these issues become recurring themes throughout her fifty years of published work and public speaking. Levertov quotes with warm approval, "Literature is dynamite because it asks – proposes – moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of human life."
Such a colourful background of social activism and engagement with peace and justice issues make this small anthology an intriguing account of her spiritual experience. So much moral outrage, political courage and protest put into powerful words. She produced a stream of ethical reflection and publicly spoken uneasiness with the status quo. Such engagement and responsiveness to the world created various strands of inner experience in process of being woven into a spirit that, at the right time, found a new and renewing depth in her discovery of the reality of God.
This is the last in this series about thin books. But it leads into the next week's writing, when I'll try to commend and comment on one of Levertov's poems, mainly from her own chose anthology.
Her poem, 'Suspended', printed above, has long been an important port of call for me when either life has come clattering down and around me, or I have struggled to hold on to whatever it is that faith is. I know it by heart. When our daughter Aileen died, I remember times of reciting, or reading this poem, and thanking God for the truth of its last line.
I have no idea what a poet thinks they are doing when they write a poem and send it out into the world. How can they even imagine what words can do if they come at the right time, and are the right words? It's a mystery, and one that is made to feel all the deeper when the poet's words come as a word from that mysterious mercy that enables us to say, "I have not plummeted."
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