Denise Levertov Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.

Denise Levertov
The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Denise Levertov
Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.

Denise Levertov
Among a hundred windows shining
dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
one burns
these several years, each night
as if the room within were aflame.

Denise Levertov
Mountain, mountain, mountain,
marking time. Each
nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering
redefinition of
horizon.

Denise Levertov
Beespittle, droppings, hairs
of beefur: all become honey.
Virulent micro-organisms cannot
survive in honey.

Denise Levertov
Blue bead on the wick,
there's that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god.

Denise Levertov
I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Denise Levertov
It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something this is in process.

Denise Levertov
Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!

Denise Levertov
What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

Denise Levertov
Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.

Denise Levertov
My pleasure
was in the strength of my back,
in my noble shoulders, the cool
smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.

Denise Levertov
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence....

Denise Levertov
Do you mistake me?
I am speaking of living,
of moving from one moment into
the next, and into the
one after, breathing
death in the spring air....

Denise Levertov
I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

Denise Levertov
All of us know he means
we mustn't, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it's not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion

Denise Levertov
Let Ariel learn
a blessing for Caliban
and Caliban drink dew from the lotus
open upon the waters.

Denise Levertov
Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

Denise Levertov
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.

Denise Levertov
It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

Denise Levertov
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....

Denise Levertov
Marvelous Truth, confront us
at every turn,
in every guise.

Denise Levertov
That's joy, it's always
a recognition, the known
appearing fully itself, and
more itself than one knew.

Denise Levertov
Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August...

Denise Levertov
To speak of sorrow
works upon it
moves it from its
crouched place barring
the way to and from the soul's hall...

Denise Levertov
I was the first to see him, for I grew
out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed...

Denise Levertov
I am not joking. I'm speaking
of spirit. Not dogma but spirit. The Way.

Denise Levertov
Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.

Denise Levertov
The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.

Denise Levertov