Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

LIFE ILLUMINED AROUND DENISE LEVERTOV 267

and constantly

nevertheless

persists in beauty,

she asks at the end,

Who can utter

the praise of such generosity

or the shame?

Her poem has already answered that psalmlike question.
“My mother was descended from the Welsh tailor and mystic Angel Jones of
Mold, my father from the noted Hasid, Schneour Zalman, ‘the Rav of Northern
White Russia’.” Levertov herself, born in Essex outside London, attended only
ballet school, did lessons at home, and was greatly read to in “a house full of books.”
She traces her spiritual, earthly, verbal fervency to that Christian-Judaic legacy, as
in “Illustrious Ancestors”: “thinking some line still taut between me and them,”
she summons up the mystical Russian rabbi who understood the language of birds,
and the Welsh tailor whose meditations “were sewn into coats and britches.”

I would like to make...

poems direct as what the birds said,

hard as a floor, sound as a bench,

mysterious as the silence when the tailor

would pause with his needle in the air.

Another poem, “The 90th Year,” credits her mother:

It was she

who taught me to look;

to name the flowers when I was still close to the ground,

my face level with theirs.

Under “the roar / of mowers / cropping the already short / grass of lawns,” “In
California” looks close at “miner’s lettuce, / tender, untasted.”
Paul Levertoff, Denise ’s father, had broken with his parents and Judaism “to
be, as he believed, the more fully a Jew,” she says. Ordained an Anglican priest,
he published a book when she was five, St. Paul in Jewish Thought, which at one
point focuses on a certain Jewish quality: “This union of a deep faith in God
with the highest concentration of human energy.” He goes on, uncannily in 1928,
to as much as foretell Denise Levertov’s poetic creed: “Jewish materialism is
religiousmaterialism, or, rather, realism. For every idea and every ideal the Jew
demands a visible and touchable materialization.” Given “the highest spiritual
truth,” he must “see and feel its real working. He believes in the invisible...
but he desires that this invisible should become visible and reveal its power; that
it should permeate everything material.”