Denise Levertov Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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

Denise Levertov
The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and need not
touch the stone.

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

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
I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Denise Levertov
Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water
lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer
upon them; let a boat be kept there.

Denise Levertov
In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

Denise Levertov
Slowly the pale
dew-beads of light
lapped up from flowers
can thicken,
darken to gold:
honey of the human.

Denise Levertov
A blind man. I can stare at him
ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
No, he is in a great solitude.
O, strange joy,
to gaze my fill at a stranger's face.
No, my thirst is greater than before.

Denise Levertov
And our dreams,
with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.

Denise Levertov
At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem
and I drank of the brackish
spring there....

Denise Levertov
The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.

Denise Levertov
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?

Denise Levertov
There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am...

Denise Levertov
To leave the open fields
and enter the forest, that was the rite.
Knowing there was mystery, they could go.
Go back now! And he receded among the multitude of forms, the twists and shadows they saw now, listening to the hum of the world's wood.

Denise Levertov
And not till he saw the angel had left him,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what he had still to do,
not till then did he recognize
this was no dream.

Denise Levertov
In June the bush we call
alder was heavy, listless,
its leaves studded with galls,
growing wherever we didn't
want it.

Denise Levertov
Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.

Denise Levertov
Life after life after life goes by
without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love.

Denise Levertov
I love them
for finding what
I can't find, and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

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

Denise Levertov