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Denise Levertov Quotes
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Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber...
Denise Levertov
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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
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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
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
Denise Levertov
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I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Denise Levertov
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Pure dust that is all
in all. Bless,
weightless Spirit. Drink
Caliban, push your tongue
heavy into the calyx.
Denise Levertov
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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
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The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
Denise Levertov
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If woman is inconstant,
ebb and flow, I fall
in season and now
is a time of ripening.
Denise Levertov
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Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
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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
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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
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The music reached us. Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.
Denise Levertov
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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
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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
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Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
Denise Levertov
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Denise Levertov
Creative Commons
Born:
October 24, 1923
Died:
December 20, 1997
(aged 74)
Bio:
Denise Levertov was a British-born American poet.
Known for:
Breathing the Water (1987)
This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
Sands of the Well (1996)
The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov
Most used words:
life
tree
reader
sang
roots
earth
fire
poem
door
dawn
forest
grass
lack
fog
poetry
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