empowered. The prototype occurs in Homer’s
Odysseywhen Odysseus journeys to the world
of the dead to ask the ghost of the prophet Tire-
sias about how to return home. Another well-
known katabasis is Orpheus’s descent to reclaim
his dead wife, Eurydice, which Levertov briefly
refers to in ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus.’’ How-
ever, in her poem, Levertov interprets the theme
in an entirely new way. The tree’s experience in
the poem leads it to feel back through history to
the mortal remains of its ancestors (coal) and to
attain consciousness and enlightenment (as par-
alleled by a literal walk downhill), suggesting the
theme of katabasis. Levertov’s invention of the
tree being called to consciousness as well as
walking to Orpheus seems to be derived from
Orpheus’s leading Eurydice to life. In particular,
the struggle of the tree and the entire forest
passing into a new life recalls the katabasis of
Dante Alighieri in his fourteenth-century epic
poemInferno. In that work, the author begins
by wandering through a forest representing sin
and ignorance before stumbling into the under-
world and eventually receiving enlightenment in
heaven.
STYLEIrregular Form and Meter
‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’ is divided into ten
unequal sections by the poet’s insertions of
blank lines, as between stanzas, although Lever-
tov did not use any regular stanza arrangement.
The lineation of the poem is quite complex. In
traditional poetry, lines of different lengths of
lyric meters (rhythmic patterns) might be indi-
cated by indentation of the shorter lines, while in
drama a single metrical line might be printed
offset over two or three lines when it comprises
parts spoken by two or three characters. This
kind of offset printing is used extensively by
Levertov. The poem does not employ a tradi-
tional verse structure, and the division into lines,
and particularly into offset lines, seems to follow
the logical or even grammatical, rather than the
metrical, progression of the poem. One practical
consequence of this is a problem in counting lines.
It might in some sense be justified to count two
lines where the first one ends halfway through the
average line length, while the following line con-
tinues the same thought and is offset to align with
the ending of the first, as if forming a single line of
verse (as in drama). For convenience, however,
line number references given here count every
single printed line as a discrete line, giving a
total of 161 lines. Levertov wrote extensively in
essays about the importance of line divisions and
in this regard was heavily influenced by the Black
Mountain poets.
At the line level, ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’
is not written in a traditional meter such as iambic
pentameter or any other lyric meter. Poetry that
does not use meter or rhyme is generally called
free verse, although by 1968 the abandonment of
these traditions was nearly universal among crit-
ically regarded poets, so it is hardly a distinguish-
ing characteristic of Levertov’s work. Levertov
uses some metrical effects, however. For instance
in lines 115 and 116, when she describes the first
awkward steps of the trees uprooting themselves
and walking toward Orpheus, Levertov breaks up
the natural iambic structure of English prose to
suggest their clumsy movements.Anthropomorphism
The literary device of anthropomorphism refers
to an author’s treating an animal, or even an
inanimate object, as if it were human. The name
comes from the ancient Greek wordsanthropos,
which means ‘‘human being,’’ andmorphe, which
means ‘‘form.’’ In ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus,’’
the tree that narrates the story takes on various
human characteristics, being able to reason,
speak (insofar as the narrative is in its voice),
and even walk or dance like a person. Indeed,
the main subject of the poem is the tree’s gaining
these very human characteristics. Levertov’s
unusually vivid usage of anthropomorphism cre-
ates a metaphor for the awakening of human
consciousness through mystical enlightenment,
revolutionary indoctrination, or whatever means.HISTORICAL CONTEXTBlack Mountain Poets
Black Mountain College in North Carolina
opened in 1933 and closed in 1956. The school
was founded in an attempt to sustain an exper-
imental institution that would give a liberal arts
education by involving the student directly in
artistic creation. The poetry faculty, which
included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and
many other poets who were to become promi-
nent in the 1950s and 1960s, published theBlackATreeTellingofOrpheus