myths. As Native American poet Scott Moma-
day states the law of creation: ‘‘A word has
power in itself. It comes from nothing and gives
origin to all things.’’ Levertov’s music begins
gradually with this overture. Through a series
of negations, disbelief and rumor are dispelled:
When the rippling began
I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley
with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn’t stir; the leaves of my brothers remained
outstretched,
unmoving.
By disclaiming literal and easy answers, the
tree tells us that this story takes place within, and
does not have to do with ordinary weather. Else-
where Levertov has written about needing a
‘‘horizon note’’ or rhythmical focal point for
her poetry, and she equates ‘‘horizon’’ with the
underlying ‘‘pulse’’ of the poem (PW 12). In this
sense the ‘‘treeless horizon’’ is the ‘‘open field’’
where the poet will begin to invent her form.
Each line may be read as one beat, one measure
of time elapsed, as Williams might have counted
it (Selected 326–27). This predictable but flexible
line comprises what Williams termed the ‘‘vari-
able foot.’’ Within a fairly steady rhythm, Lev-
ertov varies the patterns of stresses and the
number of words and syllables per line. In this
manner she can slow the pace or quicken it,
placing rhythmical and visual emphasis on cer-
tain words.
The first line of ‘‘A Tree Telling of Orpheus’’
gives us the poem’s rhythmical building blocks,
the primary possibilities, with two stresses (‘‘White
dawn.’’), one stress (‘‘Stillness.’’) and three stresses,
(‘‘When the rippling began’’). The three-stress
passage without punctuation opens up the poem
at the line’s end, generating a rhythmical sense of
possibilities that underscores content. Quoting
Lewis Hyde, Robert Hass offers these metaphors
as suggestions about rhythm and meanings: ‘‘Two
is an exchange, three is a circle of energy,’’ and he
also quotes a statement on rhythm by Leonard
Bernstein: ‘‘Two is the rhythm of the body, three is
the rhythm of the mind (130, 125). In Levertov’s
poem the two-stressed phrases steady the rhythm
in the first thirty lines, thumping like a heartbeat:
white dawn, sea-wind, white fog, short trunk, gold
grass, etc. This emphasis shifts to three beats or
more as the poem enters the deepest and most
stirring sections of the narrative.
Thetwo-linebridgebetweenthefirstand
second clusters of imagery has been set apart
spatially, indented deeply. These lines draw our
attention: ‘‘Yet I was not afraid, only/deeply
alert.’’ The shorter line carries rhythmical weight,
with its heavy stress on ‘‘deep’’ and its stress on the
second syllable of ‘‘alert.’’ The stress on ‘‘deep’’
underscores poetry’s ability to evoke a hypnotic
state. ‘‘Alert’’ reminds us to focus with a clear
mind on the text. Here the poet is describing her
own state of mind as she composes, her own deep
listening for the emerging patterns in the poem.
The narrative has described Orpheus’s effect
upon the tree. As the ‘‘ripple drew nearer’’ the
tree felt scorched by dry heat. We learn to know
the singer through the tree’s vertical body, and
from the outside in, from the bark to the sap.
The speaker’s knowledge of Orpheus is tactile
and immediate: ‘‘my own outermost branches
began to tingle, almost as if/fire had been lit
below them, too close, and their twig-tips/were
drying and curling.’’ When the tree describes
Orpheus from its non-cerebral perspective, the
images are pleasing, allowing the musician/hero
to come to life for us as in a fairy tale:
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that’s crowned by brown or
gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a
bird,
more like a flower’s.
Personification is the poet’s obvious tool for
evoking creative power. Ironically, here the tree
personifies the human from its perspective, giv-
ing us a fresh image of ourselves. Only when one
stops to think how difficult it is to accomplish
personification in the twentieth century does the
poem’s magic become clear. The poet becomes
midwife to the poem as she evokes in detail first
the tree’s body, then the echo, the man’s body.
The imagery gives us another paradigm for cre-
ation by its naming, its palpable evocation of the
hero’s body, much as oral tradition cultures
restore the world by singing the praises of the
God’s body.
Believable personification, temporarily believ-
able in the beautiful span of this long poem,
conveys to us again our own life and the life of
another creature. This ability to connect withA Tree Telling of Orpheus