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

LIFE ILLUMINED AROUND DENISE LEVERTOV 269

all night the glitter

of all that shines out of itself

crisps the vast swathes of the current.

These glints and glimpses, giving the world around us “that attention to detail
which is a species of love” (Bill Alfred), become more and more vulnerable,
more shadowed, throughout her career.
Precarious thus precious moments begin and end “An English Field in the
Nuclear Age,” as in her handwritten draft, working “To render it!” by deep
indents and abrupt line breaks, italics, spacings, parentheses.

To render it!—this moment,

haze and haloes of

sunbless’d particulars...

What fends off desperation are “centuries furrowed in oakbole, thisoak, /these
dogrose pallors.” Finally she notices

how among

thistles, nettles, subtle silver

of long-dried cowpads,

gold mirrors of buttercup satin

assert eternity as they reflect

nothing, everything, absolute instant,

and dread

holds its breath, for

this minute at least was

not the last.

Sheer craft proves these lines: the half-rhymed texture of “thistles, nettles” met
rhythmically by “subtle silver,” the run-on buckling “subtle silver” to “long-
dried cowpads.” Her late revision added a stanza break, so that “dread / / holds
its breath” while an exquisite timing metes out one more moment saved.
“Only connect”: Levertov prized E. M. Forster’s motto. Connect the illu-
mined pines with the pesticide, an English field with the nuclear age. In that
intolerable dimension where greed and carelessness violate earth’s integrity, her
mentor was not Rilke but the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,

Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,

All felled, felled, are all felled.

This, in 1879, when wasting of the land was not recognized.