the sources of the poem’s significance, including
its musicality and use of personification.
The sources of power in Denise Levertov’s
poem ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’ are both
ancient and contemporary, obvious and occult.
Embodying myth and myth-making, the poem
enacts its own genesis. Its rhythm and images
continually remind us of beginnings: of the
world, of language, and of poetry’s birth from
dance. Creation myths, according to Jungian
scholar Marie-Louise Von Franz, have always
had a stronger resonance than other mythic pat-
terns: ‘‘Of a different class from other myths...
they convey a mood which implies that what is
said will concern the basic things of existence,
something more than is contained in other
myths....Creation myths are the deepest and
most important of all myths.’’ The telling of
creation myths in many traditional societies
forms a vital part of teaching the initiatory rit-
uals. Such telling reenacts Creation, allowing the
participants to experience renewal. In Levertov’s
poem, as in oral tradition poetry, language is
active, effecting a sense of loss and renewal in
the participant/reader. As the title promises, this
is an Orphic hymn, sung by an initiate, one who
celebrates Orpheus’s gentle and powerful songs,
who retells the Orphic story of death and rebirth.
The mythic pattern of going underground, being
buried like Persephone, being torn to pieces like
the ancient corn god, and being remembered in
ritual and song—this pattern is the vital nervous
and circulatory system of the poem.
To revitalize an ancient myth is no small
task. It would be impossible to narrate Orpheus’s
journey in a short poem, much less to evoke his
famed music, or the spirit of his quest. But under-
lying and propelling the narrative, the sustained
rhythm of Levertov’s long poem permits a bodily
and imaginative sense of loss and restoration. In
its supple lines and precise rhythms, the poem
approximates dance. It asks to be read out loud,
and read as scored. In doing so, one has the feel-
ing of inhabiting one’s voice and body. There
are few poems in contemporary literature which
evoke this strong sense of physical and imagina-
tive life on the move and in harmony. Among
these are Charles Olson’s ‘‘For Sappho, Back,’’
and passages from his ‘‘As the Dead Prey
Upon Us,’’ as well as George Quasha’s ‘‘Rilke’s
Third Elegy, Transposed,’’ Robert Duncan’s
‘‘Variations on Two Dicta of William Blake,’’
and William Carlos Williams’s ‘‘Rain.’’ It is
no coincidence that Olson and Rilke/Quasha
also sing of death, dismemberment or tearing
up of roots, and rebirth. This shamanic, initia-
tory theme has a hold on us, challenging our
poets to bring to bear their most skilled use of
rhythm.
Levertov’s sources for poetry are contempo-
rary as well as traditional and mythic. In the
1960s her work was strongly influenced by the
theory and practice of projective verse as well as
by the work of other innovative contemporary
poets. Robert Duncan, who believed in poetry’s
magical qualities, and who had the most subtle
ear for rhythm of any contemporary American
poet, had a profound impact on Levertov’s
work. In addition, in her own writing on theory
she quotes and assimilates Charles Olson’s writ-
ings on projective verse. Some of Olson’s ideas
are particularly helpful in considering ‘‘A Tree
Telling of Orpheus.’’ According to Olson, the
contemporary poet works in the ‘‘open field,’’
listening for the form that is appropriate to
each poem, rather than paying homage to inher-
ited forms. The blank page is a charged field,
a source of energy, for the poet who knows
how to bring out its rhythmical life, to find the
right ‘‘musical phrase’’ (Ezra Pound’s term).
‘‘Kinetics,’’ dynamism, the poem as ‘‘energy-
discharge’’—Olson’s terms place emphasis on
rhythm as the primary source of a poem’s crea-
tive life. Along with Olson’s theories, Levertov
includes Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘‘sprung
rhythm’’ and ‘‘inscape’’ as having influenced her
thinking about the dynamic quality and the
sense of wholeness she expects from poetry. In
harmony with sound and image, the rhythmical
structure of each poem will tell its deepest story,
inventing itself formally as the story unfolds.
Robert Creeley’s principle that ‘‘FORM IS
NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSIONPERSONIFICATION IS THE POET’S OBVIOUS
TOOL FOR EVOKING CREATIVE POWER. IRONICALLY,
HERE THE TREE PERSONIFIES THE HUMAN FROM
ITS PERSPECTIVE, GIVING US A FRESH IMAGE
OF OURSELVES.’’A Tree Telling of Orpheus