Greek for ‘‘god is everything’’). When a religious
movement is based on mysticism, this can
become a normative belief of the sect, as was
the case with the Chabad movement founded
by Levertov’s great-grandfather. In other cases
it can lead to accusations of heresy against the
mystic by religious authorities, as with the medi-
eval Christian mystics Julian of Norwich and
Meister Eckhart. The experience of Levertov’s
tree is pantheistic. The tree’s consciousness is
extended to the entire universe, which stands
for god in pantheistic mysticism. The tree expe-
riences the entire range of history without the
limitation of time in that it simultaneously expe-
riences its own existence and that of its remote
ancestors hundreds of millions of years ago,
before the geological coal age. At the same time
the tree’s consciousness is extended throughout
the physical universe so that it encompasses the
unseen motions of the sun and moon. Insofar
as the tree becomes more and more personified
(portrayed in the likeness of a human being)
while also perceiving Orpheus as being a tree
(with a trunk and limbs), it is approaching iden-
tification with its ‘‘creator,’’ or at least its awak-
ener. This hints at the union with god experienced
by many mystics. The tree’s union with Orpheus
is intensified when the poet stands in its shadow,
and the tree soon cannot tell if Orpheus is singing
or it is singing itself. Eventually, once it reaches
the point of mystical silence, the tree describes
the experience as one of becoming human or even
divine.
One thing that mystics agree on is that
human language, which is based on ordinary
sense perceptions and established concepts, can-
not describe the mystical experience. This is one
reason why they, like Levertov’s tree, refer to
their experience as a silence or cessation of lan-
guage. When they do use words to communicate
their new perception, they often speak in para-
doxes. The tree does this frequently, talking about
cold fire and fiery ice, for example. Another tech-
nique is to describe the mystical experience
through metaphor. It is often described as a
death (based in part on the common religious
idea that the mystic experiences during life what
everyone will after death), as when the tree likens
its experience to being chopped down. In another
common metaphor, the transformational experi-
ence is described as the burning of a flame, as
in this passage from Meister Eckhart’s seventh
Latin sermon:
Towards this union with God for which it is
created the soul strives perpetually. Fire con-
verts wood into its own likeness, and the stron-
ger the wind blows, the greater grows the fire.
Now by the fire understand love, and by the
wind the Holy Spirit. The stronger the influ-
ence of the Holy Spirit, the brighter grows the
fire of love; but not all at once, rather gradually
as the soul grows. Light causes flowers and
plants to grow and bear fruit; in animals it
produces life, but in men blessedness.
As is appropriate for a tree, Levertov’s
speaker repeatedly describes hearing Orpheus’s
song as the experience of catching fire, but
though the normal reaction of a tree to fire
would be fear, it is not afraid and instead para-
doxically finds joy in the flames.
In conjunction with the mystical elements,
the tree’s experience expresses a great deal
of what Levertov believed about poetry. In a
1973 interview with Maureen Smith reprinted
inConversations with Denise Levertov, the poet
remarked,
I think of poetry as something beyond the poet,
of which the poet is a servant, and I think of
it as a power, a force beyond oneself. I was
brought up, as you can imagine, in quite a
religious atmosphere, although not really a
conventional one; I think that the amount of
religious imagery that comes up in my poems is
certainly accounted for largely by my back-
ground.... The terminology of religion and
myth has always been very natural to me.
Levertov refers to the ancient Greek philosopher
Plato’s teaching that poetry is inspired, that the
poet is merely recording something revealed to
her in much the same way that the vision is
revealed to the mystic. In this sense, the work
of the poet as guided by inspiration is like the
dance of the trees to the music of Orpheus. That
Levertov speaks of poetic inspiration seriously,
and in ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’ is moving in
the direction of finding the source of inspiration
in some god, indeed presents a mythic way of
thinking that leads her far away from her con-
temporary poets and toward the eternity of
tradition.
Source:Bradley Skeen, Critical Essay on ‘‘A Tree Telling
of Orpheus,’’ in Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage
Learning, 2010.Ed Block, Jr.
In the following excerpt from an interview with
Block, Levertov discusses her careers as a poetA Tree Telling of Orpheus