Denise Levertov Quotes

86 Sourced Quotes

Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

Denise Levertov
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.

Denise Levertov
If woman is inconstant,
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.

Denise Levertov
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.

Denise Levertov
I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

Denise Levertov
Leaps of nerve, heart —
cries of communion: if there is bliss,
it has
been already
and will be; out-
reaching, utterly.
Blind
to itself, flooded
with otherness.

Denise Levertov
The music reached us. Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.

Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry. I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line.

Denise Levertov
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
leaf-tips
further.

Denise Levertov
Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

Denise Levertov
An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog, send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

Denise Levertov
Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

Denise Levertov
To serve the people,
one must write for the ideal reader. Only for the ideal reader.
And who or what is that ideal reader? God. One must imagine,
One must deeply imagine

Denise Levertov
Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appearrs, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds — the indivisible shared out in endless abundance.

Denise Levertov
When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Denise Levertov
And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder —
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.

Denise Levertov
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.

Denise Levertov
We call it 'Nature'; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be 'Nature' too.

Denise Levertov
Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom he was chained — unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening —
out!

Denise Levertov
I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling.... ("Seeing For a Moment")

Denise Levertov
One of the obligations of the writer, and perhaps especially of the poet, is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

Denise Levertov
It is said he made his earth-journey, and lost
what he sought.
It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.

Denise Levertov
He himself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.

Denise Levertov
You can live for years next door
to a big pinetree [sic], honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.

Denise Levertov
He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words – ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.

Denise Levertov
Yes, he is here in this open field, in sunlight, among the few young trees set out to modify the bare facts— he's here, but only because we are here. When we go, he goes with us to be your hands that never do violence, your eyes that wonder, your lives that daily praise life by living it, by laughter. He is never alone here, never cold in the field of graves.

Denise Levertov