Musing of nature: the mysteries of contemplation and the sources of myth in Denise Levertov's poetry.

Herrera, Jose Rodriguez

In "The Sense of Pilgrimage," an essay in which Denise Levertov acknowledges the mythic elements running through her poetry, she states:

Man is the animal that perceives analogies. Even when cut off from

tradition, the correspondences that, if he holds open the doors of his

understanding, he cannot but perceive, will form images that are

myth. The intellect, if not distorted by divorce from the other

capacities, it is not obstructive to the experience of the mysterious.

(PW 84)

The analogising mind apprehends the correspondences between natural objects which reveal themselves as symbols of the mysterious force, heralds of the numen. The apprehension of the mysterious, the numinous within these natural symbols, when attended by the Imagination which Coleridge called primary ("the living power and prime agent of all human perception") will beget the myth. If properly woven into the poem, the "images that are myth" will manifest their deeper coherence.

However, those "other capacities" the intellect should not be "obstructive to," if the experience of the mysterious and the spiritual is to be attained, do not partake of the "rational" intellect, or Logos, but rather of the intuitive, natural Eros. In the American culture, Emerson was one of the first to draw on the schism between the intellect as embodiment of reason and the spirit embodied in Nature: "that which, intellectually considered, we call Reason, considered in relation to Nature, we call Spirit" (13). According to Emerson, the transubstantiation of the spiritual into the material makes Nature "a temple whose walls are covered with emblems of the Deity" (203). Levertov, like H.D.'s Helen in Egypt, wanders full of awe--"awe-full" as Robert Duncan would be prone to call it--in the temple of Nature paying due tribute to its hieroglyphs, the secret stone-writing on the wall. She has a cue to the hidden meaning of the hieroglyph yet her knowledge of the symbols, like Helen's, "is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual" (Helen in Egypt 7). Though Helen denies an intellectual knowledge of the symbols in her Amen Temple, she "is nearer to them than the instructed scribe; for her, the secret of the stone-writing is repeated in natural or human symbols. She herself is the writing" (22).

As Northrop Frye explains in his essay "The Symbol as a Medium of Exchange," symbol stems from the Greek word symballein "which means to put together or, in many contexts, to throw together" (28). A symbolon was a token or a counter, "something that could be broken in two and recognized again by the identity of the break" (28). As Aristophanes states in Plato's Symposium, in the beginning men and women were androgynous, self-accomplished beings complete in themselves. Zeus, however, decided to split them into two parts as a punishment for their alleged arrogance; therefore, Aristophanes concludes, every one of us is a symbolo [Greek noun], a split part that craves the other half to complete itself. Symbolos, on the other hand, is a masculine noun of the same root meaning an omen or augury verbalizing the significance of certain natural phenomena or interpreting the revelation of certain sacrificial rites.

Levertov's "Fair Warning," a poem included in her latest collection of poems, Sands of the Well, presents an owl whose call of unappeasable hunger foreshadows his unprotractable huntings, his "mournful notes" but a "fair warning" of his ubiquitous presence. Is this not what omens stand for? Aren't they but a fair warning so that we get ready for whatever might befall us?

Rain and the dark. The owl,

terror of those he must hunt,

flies back and forth, hungry.

Darkly, solemnly, softly, over and over,

he makes known his presence,

his call a falling of mournful notes,

his tone much like the dove's. (13)

Levertov's owl makes his appearance as the flying oracle of the woods, the carrier of an omen divinely sent; in other words, the owl appears as a harbinger of the numen, a symbolos. Further on in the same book, in "Creature to Creature," Levertov recounts once walking in the woods "almost too late" yet having her recklessness rewarded by receiving "a gift from the dusk":

a small owl, not affrighted, merely

moving deliberately

to a branch a few feet

further from me, looked

full at me--a long regard,

steady, acknowledging, unbiassed. (44)

The "long regard" seems to betray a complicity rendered by aeons of mutual understanding. Like the hieroglyphs in the Amen Temple, the owl's gaze conceals almost as much as it reveals; hence, it could be deemed symbolic. As Carlyle remarks, "in a Symbol there is concealment and yet there is revelation: here therefore, by Silence and by Speech acting together, comes a double significance" (qtd. in Frye, 31). Every transcendental symbol, then, unveils what Levertov calls an "open secret." In this case, however, the owl is not only a symbolos, but also a symbolon, a split entity of the numen that is incarnated in the owl. The presence of the numen is apprehended by the poet through the poem which is, in Levertov's words, "the poet's means of summoning the divine." Thus, owl and poet, hieroglyph and augur are two split halves of the same entity: the numinous.

In its pristine sense, a numen was a divine will physically expressed by the deity's nodding movement of the head--the Latin nuere, "to nod." Knowing this, one is tempted to say that the owl's stare numinously acknowledges the poet; that is, it is done almost by nodding, assenting. Not surprisingly then, in "The Braiding," a poem from A Door in the Hive, the numen's presence is literally felt in the swaying gesture of the willow branches:

The way the willow-bark

braids its furrows

is answered by the willow-branches

swaying their green leaf-weavings

over the river shallows,

assenting, affirming. (71)

The immanence of the numinous in these symbols attests to Emerson's well-known assertion that "every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact" (13)--be it an owl or willow branches conversing with the bark. Levertov's poems acknowledge the indwelling presence of the divine, the numen, in the temple of Nature. Poetry and Spirituality, Nature and the Logos, the Word are thus brought together under the pervasive influence of the numen. It is something that Baudelaire had envisioned some years ago in his poem "Correspondences":

La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L'homme y passe a travers de forets de symboles

Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

[Nature is a temple from whose living pillars

confusing words are now and then released.

Man wanders through this huge, symbolic wood

while it observes him with familiar stares.]

Temples, forests, symbols, and familiar regards bespeak the presence of the numen in Nature. Likewise, Levertov wanders through the forest of symbols, bewildered by the correspondences she beholds in Nature. Her task is to express the spirit of the thing embodied in these natural symbols. Walking through the forest, she hears the first confused words that are to become the first notes of the poem:

So--as the poet stands openmouthed in the temple of life,

contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the

poem: . . . if there is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the

meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of

crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between

those elements occurs; and it occurs as words. (PW 8)

From this vision of the correspondences, Levertov extracts her major poetic formulations. First, she quotes Gerard Manley Hopkins' "inscape" as being "the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other" (PW 7). From this Hopkins term, she derives her method of organic poetry which she defines as "a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and is based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man's creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories" (PW 7). The poet then perceives the natural essences of objects and the correspondences they establish among themselves--Hopkins' "instress"--and infers the symmetries and analogies inherent to these natural objects. Thus, "all thinking is analogizing" (445), as Emerson claimed, since in Nature "all things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any object, the parts and properties of any other may be created" (241).

For Levertov, the Emersonian skill of the eye is best realized through I 'serene contemplation, a word she traces back to the Latin templum, temple, "`a place for observation marked out by the augur.' It means, not simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is `to keep the mind in a state of contemplation'; its synonym is `to muse,' and to muse comes from a word meaning `to stand with open mouth'" (PW 8). Thus, dwelling on this terminology, the poet's perception of the owl is then an act of serene contemplation. First, it could rightly be called a perception since the owl's stare is the place of encounter between poet and owl, validating Coleridge's famous dictum: "perception comes precisely in the identification of subject and object." Second, it is a contemplation, for, as stated above, the owl is a symbol of a divine, spiritual presence with the woods as the awesome temple, and the poet as the openmouthed augur.

Albert Gelpi, in "Two Notes on Denise Levertov and the Romantic Tradition," defines Levertov's notion of life as sacramental; in the tension that is originated in the encounter of mind (Levertov's "eye of the mind") and Nature, "experience is a communion with objects which are in themselves signs of their own secret mystery" (92). Certainly, in Levertov's poems, common, everyday objects yield their mystery when properly summoned. The known in the unknown, what lies hidden yet distinct, when newly apprehended through and within the poem, reveals itself "appearing more fully itself, and / more itself, than one knew" (P 59). As Ralph I Mills, Jr., remarks about her, "what she so shrewdly observed was that the ordinary is extraordinarily unusual" (102). When the poet's eye of the mind encounters these mysteries, there is always a pleasure, an epiphany of recognition as in "Pleasures," from With Eyes at the Back of our Heads:

I like to find

what's not found

at once, but lies

within something of another nature,

in repose, distinct. (CEP 90)

As Levertov herself once postulated, "this acknowledgement, and celebration of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings" (NSE 246). In "The Novices," one of her most widely praised poems on the mysterious, Levertov presents a father and his son entering the woods, summoned by a spirit to perform "some rite." When the man starts to uproot a chain tied at the other end to an oak tree, the spirit of the woods, "the wood demon," appears and "makes his will known":

not for an act of force he called them,

for no rite of obscure violence

but that they might look about them

and see the intricate branch and bark,

stars of moss and the old scars

left by the dead men's saws,

and not ask what that chain was.

To leave the open fields

and enter the forest,

that was the rite.

knowing there was a mystery, they could go.

Go back now! And he receded

among the multitude of forms,

the twists and the shadows they saw now, listening

to the hum of the world's wood. (P 128)

The wood demon had not called them to the woods to know more about the chain; nor had they been summoned to hear the bright word of the Logos but "that they might look about them / and see . . ." Now that they have learned that there was a mystery, they may leave the woods; yet they leave the woods seeing. They now have the power to perceive through and beyond the material, Rilke's einsehen, "inseeing." Therefore, the rite was all too simple: to "enter the forest." As happens with many of Levertov's poems, the acknowledgement of a certain mystery always entails the performance of a rite to commemorate the divine presence that is incarnated in and heralded by the mysterious.

Thus, the ritual experience of mystery turns into a religious endeavor. When once asked the meaning of the word "religion," in an interview for New York Quarterly, Levertov answered that it meant "the impulse to kneel in wonder. . . . The sense of awe. The felt presence i of some mysterious force whether it be what one calls beauty, or perhaps just the sense of the unknown--I don't mean `unknown' in the sense of we don't know what the future will bring. I mean the sense of the numinous whether it's in a small stone or a large mountain" (Wagner 19). Thus, the mysterious may assume various forms in her poetry. Recurrently, it takes the form of an enfolding stillness. This felt presence of the numinous within the stillness arouses in the poet a sense of "an awe so quiet / I don't know when it began" (OP "`. . . That Passeth All Understanding'" 85)--and the intense need to celebrate that mystery.

This flood of stillness

widening the lake of the sky:

this need to dance,

this need to kneel:

this mystery: ("Of Being" 86)

In "Suspension," transparent "empty air" is the medium in which the poet acknowledges the presence of the numen. Mystery this time lies in the poet's being suspended in the air without feeling the grasp of God, "feeling nothing." Levertov underscores in this poem that her sense of mystery is suffused with the religious, sacramental experience of a numen, of God whose presence, though "unfelt," is intuitively surmised by the poet:

I had grasped God's garment in the void but my hand

slipped on the rich silk of it. The `everlasting arms' my

sister loved to remember must have upheld my leaden

weight from falling, even so, for though I claw at empty

air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummetted.

(ET 119)

"Sands of the Well" condenses all the qualities of mystery: "perception," "meditation," the slow descent of the grains of sand simulating the circling down of the enfolding numen, "stillness'" and, finally, transparency in Nature. Once again, the mysterious heralds the numinous:

The golden particles

descend, descend,

traverse the water's

depth and come to rest

on the level bed

of the well until,

the full descent

accomplished, water's

absolute transparence

is complete, unclouded

by constellations

of bright sand.

Is this

the place where you

are brought in meditation?

Transparency

seen for itself--

as if its quality

were not, after all,

to enable

perception not of itself?

With a wand

of willow I again

trouble the envisioned pool,

the cloudy nebulae

form and disperse,

the separate

grains again

slowly, slowly,

perform their descent,

and again

stillness ensues,

and the mystery

of that sheer

clarity, is it water indeed,

or air, or light? (SW 124-25)(1)

Mystery in the poem is embodied in the stillness of transparent water: "that sheer / clarity," Both Emerson and Thoreau saw and meditated upon the same transparency in Nature. Nature, however, yields its transparency not only to allow the looking through but also to be "seen for itself." Therefore, the mystery lies in Nature's "opaque" transparency, which turns it into both a self-contained symbol of something else and that same something else the symbol refers to, both the harbinger of the numen and the very numen embodied.

The mysterious, whether it be manifest in an owl, a willow branch, God himself, or a well, will continue to take place every single day of our lives, caring not the least about our attention. Whether or not we finally decide to enter the dark woods to witness the miracle, the intricate mass of willow leaves will still hold conversation with the braided bark, for "much happens when we're not there. / Many trees, not only that famous one, over and over, / fall in the forest." Our attention might drift somewhere else at that same moment--"Much moves in and out of open windows / when our attention is somewhere else, /just as our souls move in and out of our bodies sometimes" (BW "Window-Blind" 13)--but that does not invalidate the actual occurrence of the extraordinary for the same reason that the poet's unfelt embrace does not belie the mystery: "I have not plummetted." Thus, whether we are aware or not, "things happen anyway." In the early poem "To the Reader," Levertov warns the reader that while he/she is enmeshed in the act of reading the most extraordinary events are taking place:

As you read, a white bear leisurely

pees, dyeing the snow

saffron,

and as you read, many gods

lie among lianas: eyes of obsidian

are watching the generations of leaves,

and as you read

the sea is turning its dark pages,

turning

its dark pages. (P 1)

With an address to the reader similar to Baudelaire's well-known "Hypocrite lecteur,--mom semblable,--mon frere!" ("Hypocrite reader--my likeness--my brother!"), Levertov attempts to win the complicity of the reader, claiming her kinship with him/her on the ground of the Imagination--a bear peeing saffron, gods carelessly lying among lianas, and the dark billowy sea seen as a book "turning / its dark pages." All this, so the reader is told, is taking place somewhere else as he/she browses the pages of the book. At the end, however, the reader is also left with the choice of imagining the book a billowy sea. A platter of jouissance served to the reader by the Imagination itself since it is in the nature of the imaginative act to provide joy and pleasure.

In "Poetry and Imagination" Emerson stated that "the act of imagination is ever attended by pure delight ... It infuses a certain volatility and intoxication in Nature ... The mountains begin to dislimn, and float in the air" (447). In Levertov's poetry, mountains evaporate too, their volatile essences distilled to substantiate themselves again before the witnessing poet. In her two last books of poems, Levertov devotes some of her poems to a mountain, Mount Rainier outside Seattle where she lived, whose vanishings and apparitions seem to be necessarily recurrent: "What does it serve to insist / ... that its vanishings / are needful, as silence is to music?" (ET "Against Intrusion," 94). The mountain either lies hidden,, sometimes the mountain / is hidden from me in veils / of apparition ..." ("Witness" 97); or it retreats only to appear later on the horizon--"the mountain comes and goes / on the horizon" ("Elusive" 4); or it whispers humanlike--"breathes / a vast whisper: / the mountain" ("Whisper" 96). However, herein lies precisely the power of the mountain, in being, like the symbol, a repository of concealment and revelation:

The mountain's power

lies in the open secret of its remote

apparition, silvery low relief

coming and going moonlike at the horizon,

always loftier, lonelier, than I ever remember.

("Open Secret" 14)

Imagination, however, is for Levertov an organ of perception specially suitable for summoning God, here imagined as a ubiquitous, hidden symbol of "white stillness."

is imagined

as well or better

in the white stillness

resting everywhere,

giving to all things

an hour of Sabbath,

no leaf stirring,

the hidden places

tranquil in solitude ... ("Morning Mist" 5)

Imagination is, therefore, both a symbolon and a symbolos: on the one hand, it is a token of the numinous, a split half through which it is possible to recognize the other half (one is reminded of Wallace Stevens' "God and the Imagination are one"). On the other hand, as a symbolos, it also foretells the presence of God. As Levertov asserts, it "is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God" (NSE 241). To imagine, in other words, is to keep the avenues of the mind open to the experience of the numinous. Thus, according to Levertov, "to believe, as an artist, in inspiration or the intuitive, to know that without Imagination (and I give it the initial capital in conscious allusion to Keats' famous dictum) no amount of acquired craft or scholarship or of brilliant reasoning will suffice, is to live with a door of one's life open to the transcendent, the numinous" (NSE 241).

Intuition and inspiration are the pathways that lead to the experience of the numinous. Paraphrasing Wallace Stevens, "reason will not suffice." The poet is suffused with the power to create in a pseudounconscious impasse of "active passivity," a waiting to be imbued with inspiration. In "The Well," Levertov tells us how she believed that moonlight would change her so that she "moonbathed / diligently, as others sunbathe." However, her moonlit nights, when she became obsessive to the point of moving even her bed, "as the moon slowly / crossed the open lattice," proved to no avail. Yet

It was on nights of deep sleep

that I dreamed the most, sunk in the well,

and woke rested, and if not beautiful,

filled with some other power. (BW "The Well" 57)

No effort earns the all-encompassing embrace of that power, Levertov teaches us. Only after her nights of profound sleep did she wake the next day suffused with the creative power that finds its recipient in the poet, an instrument "on which the power of poetry plays" (PW 3).

Finally, there comes the time for the poet to sit at the loom and weave together these loose strands into the mythic tapestry. Her basic material for this tapestry is a "colloquial, literalistic language that strives to become numinous" (Breslin 58). What "Song for Ishtar" comes to prove is that Levertov has not been idle at the loom:

The moon is a sow

and grunts in my throat

Her great shining shines through me

so the mud of my hollow gleams

and breaks in silver bubbles

She is a sow

and I a pig and a poet

When she opens her white

lips to devour me I bite back

and laughter rocks the moon

In the black of desire

we rock and grunt, grunt and

shine. (PW 75)

All the elements that, for Levertov, beget the mythic images are contained in this poem. The moon is a symbolos, a harbinger of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of fertility rites. Levertov, as Dianne F. Sadoff states, "invokes the Babylonian moon goddess as an emblem of imagination" (100). The presence of the moon goddess as symbol of the imagination catalyzes the poet into reimagining role identities and sexual identities. As a result, Ishtar is turned into a sow while the poet takes the appearance of a pig. Gender, on the other hand, is also reimagined to the point that the moon goddess, regardless of her femininity, assumes a masculine identity, whereas the poet, despite calling herself a pig, has her "hollow" impregnated by the moon. The pig and the sow are presented individually as a split entity of the divine numen, a symbolon, each yearning for wholeness through the union with the other. Attended by desire and imagination, poet/pig and moon goddess/sow attain their unitary identity. Their androgynous gender might be explained then as the final integration of the opposite sexes. Moreover, Ishtar, who anciently bore the titles of "Opener of the Womb" and "Silver-Shining," fertilizes the poet's hollow with her creative moonbeams so that it "breaks in silver bubbles." The sow and the pig, Ishtar and the poet, thus attain their silvery unity and become one with nature. The correspondences between moon goddess and poet are also shown in their devouring and biting back, followed by mutual rocking and grunting. Both pig and sow grunt with the music of the "instress" or correspondences between natural objects, that is, to become "a music of sounds and meanings, awakening the mythological reality in the actual" (Duncan 30). This mythic music reverberates with the echoes of the creative power that is derived from the poet's interactions with the numen. Finally, there is a jouissance, a celebratory ritual of this mystery that culminates in the one-word line "shine I " which mirrors the orgasmic experience of mystic union with the divinity. "Song for Ishtar," therefore, is not simply a poem on a Babylonian myth but a recreation and rewriting of the myth through the apprehension of its true sources. This revision of the myth complies with Rachel Blau DuPlessis' "reinvention of myth," which she defines as the process of "appropriating and rediscovering the essential mythic experiences" (212). Thus, Levertov's mythological poems actually enact what Robert Duncan once prophesied: "The myth of the poem will write itself anew" (17), yet now, Levertov, as Helen, "is herself the writing."

Note

(1)) [C] 1996 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of the New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Works Cited

Breslin, James E. B. "Denise Levertov." Gelpi 55-90.

Doolittle, Hilda. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1961.

Duncan, Robert. "The Truth and Life of Myth." Fictive Certainties. New York: New Directions, 1955. 1-59.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "The Critique of Consciousness and Myth in Levertov, Rich, and Rukeyser." Gelpi 218-42.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Critical Edition of the Major Works. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

Frye, Northrop. "The Symbol as Medium of Exchange." Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays 1974-1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1990. 28-43.

Gelpi, Albert. "Two Notes on Denise Levertov and the Romantic Tradition," Gelpi 91-95.

Gelpi, Albert, ed. Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Ann Arbor: UP of Michigan, 1993.

Levertov, Denise. Breathing the Water. New York: New Directions, 1987. Cited in the text as BW.

--. Collected Earlier Poems. New York: New Directions, 1979. Cited in the text as CEP.

--. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1989.

--. Evening Train. New York: New Directions, 1993. Cited in the text as ET.

--. New & Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1992. Cited in the text as NSE.

--. Oblique Prayers. New York: New Directions, 1984. Cited in the text as OP.

--. Poems 1960-1967. New York: New Directions, 1983. Cited in the text as P.

--. The Poet in the World. New York: New Directions, 1973. Cited in the text as PW.

--. Sands of the Well. New York: New Directions, 1996. Cited in the text as SW. Mills, Ralph J. "Denise Levertov: Poetry of the Immediate. "Wagner-Martin 98-110.

Sadoff, Dianne F. 1978. "Mythopoeia, the Moon, and Contemporary Women's Poetry." The Massachusetts Review 13.1: 93-110.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Critical Essays on Denise Levertov. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Wagner, Linda Welshimer, ed. Interview. Denise Levertov: In her own Province. New York: New Directions, 1979. 1-21.