other beings is what we have lost in contempo-
rary society....
Source:Marilyn Kallet, ‘‘Moistening Our Roots with
Music: Creative Power in Denise Levertov’s ‘A Tree Tell-
ing of Orpheus,’’’ inTwentieth Century Literature, Vol.
38, No. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 305–23.
Paul Zweig
In the following excerpt, Zweig argues that many
of the poems in Levertov’sRelearning the Alpha-
bet‘‘seem incomplete.’’ He points to ‘‘A Tree Tell-
ing of Orpheus’’ as one of the strongest poems in
the volume.
I have always admired Denise Levertov’s
poetry. Her sparse, sinuous language reminds
me of an artist who is able to suggest a face, the
entire mystery of a gesture, with a single, unin-
terrupted pencil stroke....
I feel the need to describe the sort of pleasure
Miss Levertov’s poetry has given me in the past,
because her latest volumeRelearning the Alpha-
betis something of a disappointment. So many
of the poems in the new book seem incomplete,
as if the whole gesture of the hand and arm and
body had been replaced by a fingerprint in mid-
air. Instead of the poem, we are given some
words indicating that a poem passed by that
way, but did not stay long enough to leave its
mark. Take, for example, this short poem, enti-
tled ‘‘The Curve’’:
Along the tracks
counting
always the right foot awarded
the tie to step on
the left stumbling all the time in cinders
toward where
an old caboose
samples of paint were once tried out on
is weathering in a saltmarsh
to tints Giotto dreamed.
‘Shall we
ever reach it?’ ‘Look—
the tracks take a curve.
We may
come round to it
if we keep going.’
Or the concluding lines of another poem,
‘‘The Rain.’’
The birds are silent,
No moths at the lit windows, Only a
swaying rosebush
pierces the table’s reflection, rain-
drops gazing from it.There have been hands laid on my
shoulders.
What has been said to me,
how has my life replied?
The rain, the rain....
The description rambles; the poems seem to
end before they are finished. It is of course possi-
ble for a poem to be taken up short in a way that
suggests continued movement, reverberations of
meaning. That seems to be what Miss Levertov
intended here; but the effect is miscalculated.
When I read the last words of ‘‘The Rain’’ I realize
that I am still waiting for the poem to begin.
Perhaps in many of the poems the trouble
lies in part with the subject. Miss Levertov is
concerned with the experience of aging, for
example, but at the same time she seems to
avoid dealing with it explicitly, refusing to enter
wholly into it:
So slowly I am dying
you wouldn’t know it.
They say birth begins it.
But for three decades,
the sky’s valves lie open,
or close to open over again
a green pearl revealed.
Slowly, slowly,
I spin toward the sun.
The poem takes place at a great distance
from us. The feeling of weariness, the hope for
a creation expressed by the image of the oyster
and the pearl, are not elaborated or made
human. The close before we reach them, so to
speak, and we are left outside.
Another problem of subject matter even
more striking. A number of the poems in
Relearning the Alphabetare political. But aside
from the fierce, very beautiful: ‘‘Advent 1966,’’
they tend to be rambling, uninventive. ‘‘Tene-
brae,’’ ‘‘Biafra,’’ the long poem, ‘‘An Interim,’’
and the even longer ‘‘From a Notebook’’ lapse
into a sort of poetic journalese more like prose—
bad prose. There is a mood of sad self-righteous-
ness in the poems which make them hard to
experience for oneself. I know that Denise Lev-
ertov and her husband, Mitchel Goodman,
have reasons for their sadness. They have been
harassed more than most by the atmosphere
of political repressiveness in America. Their
involvement in the anti-war movement has been
important. But that situation has not encouraged
strong, generously conceived poetry, at least not
inRelearning the Alphabet. One must reread MissATreeTellingofOrpheus