Denise Levertov Quotes

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

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")

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

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.

A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

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.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

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

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.

One of the obligations of the writer 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.

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

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.

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

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.

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

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.

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

The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains them;so would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.

Looking, Walking, Being, I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes dig and burrow into the world. They touch, fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, not only visible present, solid and shadow that looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms of echo and interruption? That's a way of breathing. breathing to sustain looking, walking and looking, through the world, in it.

I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder.

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, 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.

If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

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

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

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.

Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.

There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

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?

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

Images split the truth in fractions.

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.

The artist must create himself or be born again.

Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

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

In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.

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.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.

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.

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.

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