OF CONTENT,’’ says Olson, gives the poem its
life (Selected 16).
Re-visioning Creeley and Olson, Levertov
goes one step further by insisting on the magical
quality of verse: ‘‘Form is never more than a
revelation of content’’ (PW 13). Like Duncan,
Levertov believes in the innate and perfect form
waiting to be embodied in the poem. Rather than
on magic, Olson had focused on the sophis-
ticated mechanics of listening for the poem,
involving:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the
SYLLABLE the HEART, by way of the
BREATH, to the LINE
and on sleekness and movement (Selected
19). There must be no flab, no waste of energy—
on the contrary, ‘‘ONE PERCEPTION MUST
IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD
TO ANOTHER.’’ Levertov tones down Olson’s
line by presenting it in lower-case letters, but she
refers to it as ‘‘the law’’ (PW 13). Olson’s pro-
nouncements help to describe Levertov’s accom-
plishment in ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’: like a
mythic animal, the poem leaps into its dynamic
and perfect shape, constantly on the move in the
reader’s imagination.
This sense of the poem as a living whole,
with perfect being in musical language, conveys
Levertov’s own belief in ‘‘organic poetry.’’ Lev-
ertov expands on Hopkins’s terms ‘‘inscape’’ and
‘‘instress’’ to explain her own views on intrinsic
form and on the poet’s experience of the sensory,
intellectual, and emotional process of perceiving
the poem (PW 7). By a deep and careful listening
for the ‘‘pulse’’ or beat or ‘‘horizon’’ of the poem,
the poet intuits the form of her poem as a whole
(PW 12). In her theory and in her great long
poem, Levertov integrates Olson’s vigorous idea
and his belief in the syllable as ‘‘king’’ with Dun-
can’s clairvoyant listening and belief in magic.
The poem itself is distinctly Levertov’s, resonat-
ing beyond theories in its myth and music.
Levertov’s journey to this sustained poem
called for hard work, risk, and discipline. As a
young writer she left England for America to be
in the place where creating a new poetics was
possible. She apprenticed herself to William
Carlos Williams, visited with him and corre-
sponded with him as his health permitted from
1951 until his death in 1963. In his touching
and inspiring letters Williams urges her toward
strict discipline: ‘‘Practice, practice practice!
must be the practice of the artist. You have to
write... practically in your sleep and leap out
of bed day or night when the inevitable word
comes to yourmind: it may never come again.’’
(‘‘Letters’’ 167). Williams encourages her to write
even without inspiration: ‘‘At times there’s noth-
ing to do but finger exercises. Maybe that’s the
end. For what dreadful encounter? Nothing may
happen, I hope it never does—but if it does, your
only chance of doing some arresting writing,
something that the world is really waiting for
with open arms, is to be ready’’ (‘‘Letters’’ 164).
The ominous tone of Williams’s letter resulted
from his own struggles with illness, and with his
fear of losing his wife Flossie’s love, as well as
with political oppression: the communist ‘‘witch
hunts’’ of the 1950s had targeted him, andLIFE
magazine continued to glorify the testing of the
hydrogen bomb with spectacular photographs. In
Levertov’s eloquent anti-Vietnam war poetry,
with its language of ‘‘life that/wants to live’’ (RA
92), we find a fulfillment of Williams’s intuition
that Levertov too will have a responsibility to
deal with the serious crises of their times. The
strong feeling evoked in ‘‘A Tree Telling of
Orpheus’’ may also be seen as a crisis of being.
The poem itself is the dramatization of an inner
crisis as well as its temporary resolution. A love
poem, and a poem about the Muse, it tells us what
the poet did while she was ‘‘waiting’’ for the Muse
to come back. She learned to dance in a graceful,
strenuous measure that far outstripped anything
Williams had predicted for women poets
(‘‘Women can rarely do it’’ ‘‘Letters’’ 165)....
Orpheus, proto-poet, Thracian son of Kal-
liope, one of the Muses, Orpheus whose name
alone is an invocation, consummate musician,
the one who awakens things by singing and
naming them, the beloved, the one whom crea-
tures follow, Orpheus who sings his way down
through the underworld to find Eurydice and
then loses her again, the one who is torn apart
by the Furies, whose head goes out to sea still
singing—Orpheus the hero does not sing his
own story for us. His initiate recounts for us
the time when Paradise was at hand, when the
Muse was close enough to touch. If Orpheus
himself did the singing, could we bear the inten-
sity? Humbly, like one of us, the tree begins its
story at the beginning.
‘‘White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling
began...’’ Thepoem opens with its song of
emergence from silence and nothingness. The
mood is charged with the solemnity of genesisATreeTellingofOrpheus