Denise Levertov Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

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
Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber...

Denise Levertov
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow.
You the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

Denise Levertov
Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.

Denise Levertov
Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

Denise Levertov
I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.

Denise Levertov
Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

Denise Levertov
To me it seems perhaps
Kropotkin understood half
of what we need to know,
and Lenin perhaps
knew half, and true revolution … true revolution
must put these two halves together?

Denise Levertov
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.

Denise Levertov
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

Denise Levertov
Pure dust that is all
in all. Bless,
weightless Spirit. Drink
Caliban, push your tongue
heavy into the calyx.

Denise Levertov