in her early adult life Levertov thought of herself
as an atheist, she was able to approach these
diverse traditions without the prejudice of feel-
ing that there could only be a single truth among
them, and she found them all to be of equal
value. As Levertov herself said, in an interview
with Michael Andre reprinted inConversations
with Denise Levertov, of her unique upbringing,
for her, ‘‘it was not a contradiction to be both
Jewish and Christian.’’ What especially inter-
ested her was the commonalities among the
various traditions. And indeed, there are pro-
nounced similarities among these spiritualities,
since despite radically different approaches and
contexts, they all drew part of their inspiration
form the seminal works of the ancient Greek
philosopher Plato. It is hardly surprising that
one of Levertov’s first major attempts to deal
in poetry with her religious impulses and studies
should take the form of a myth of Orpheus, since
the Orphic tradition was in turn one of the foun-
dations of Plato’s thought.
There are two possible responses to myth.
One is to dismiss it as a kind of failed science that
does a very poor job of describing the world and
contains much nonsense. The other is to treat
myth as validation through language of a cul-
ture’s tradition that also provides a sense of
meaning to life. The meaning that myth provides
can be viewed as similar to that provided by
music, being of an entirely different kind than
rational discourse. Despite rejecting Christianity
through much of her adult life, Levertov never
doubted that myths—all myths, not just Christian
traditions—contain meaning. Levertov shared
with many schools of anthropology and psychol-
ogy the belief that the human mind naturally
expresses many ideas and perceptions in mythic
form, as she affirms in her essay ‘‘The Sense
of Pilgrimage’’ (quoted by Jose ́Rodrı ́guez Her-
rera in the 1997 issue ofRenascencedevoted to
Levertov):
Man is the animal that perceives analogies.
Even when cut off from tradition, the corre-
spondences 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.Since, for Levertov, myth is something that
arises from the human condition, it is natural
that one will find similarities in myth between
cultures and religions, yielding more essential
human truths.
What interested Levertov especially in ‘‘A
Tree Telling of Orpheus’’ is a particular form of
mythic and spiritual expression known as mysti-
cism. A mystic changes his consciousness by
shifting his perception from its ordinary focus
on the senses (such as sight and hearing) to some
interior part of the self that is not ordinarily
perceived. Jewish mystics, for instance, often
describe the mystical experience as a process of
going down into oneself, while the Catholic mys-
tic St. Teresa of A ́vila described it as a journey
through an interior castle. Religious mystics nat-
urally believe that whatever they reach inside
themselves is the god defined by their religious
belief. This kind of transformational experience
is what informs Levertov’s tree’s awakening to
consciousness for the first time. The tree is awak-
ening from his vegetative condition to conscious-
ness, while the mystic awakens from ordinary
consciousness to the consciousness of the god
within himself. The mystic’s altering of con-
sciousness is often accomplished through inves-
ting attention in some repetitive act, such as
chanting, that serves to suppress awareness of
the sensual world and allows the perception of
other sources of meaning. While in the original
myth Orpheus’s song was probably thought to
act as a spell to make the trees walk through
magic, Levertov’s treatment of his song more
nearly resembles a kind of mystical chanting
that allows the tree to exist with a new awareness
of itself and the world. The tree’s claim that its
experience is a silence presents one of the most
common terms used by mystics to describe their
new experience. The confusion of this state with
being bored relates to a danger of mystical con-
templation that all mystics are aware of, namely,
that the repetitive technique can result in mere
boredom rather than the desired redirection
of consciousness. That the tree is perceiving
Orpheus’s song by some means beyond the
sense of hearing is emphasized by the fact that
the thunderous noise of the trees uprooting
themselves does nothing to disturb their percep-
tion of it.
It is very common for mystics, after finding
the god within themselves, to see the same mys-
tery revealed in all of nature and come to the
conclusion that their god is inherent in the entire
universe or even equivalent to the universe. This
foundational belief is called pantheism (from theATreeTellingofOrpheus