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

LIFE ILLUMINED AROUND DENISE LEVERTOV 271

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.

With Hopkins she shared a faith that the freshest language for God ’s created
world might possibly begin reclaiming it.
To bear that faith through a time of war, as Levertov unflaggingly did, makes
for poignant political poetry. Her earliest published verse, “Listening to Distant
Guns,” stems from 1940 when she was sixteen and the Germans attacked British
troops at Dunkirk.

The roses tremble; oh, the sunflower’s eye

Is opened wide in sad expectancy.

Westward and back the circling swallows fly,

The rooks’ battalions dwindle near the hill.

And in “Christmas 1944,” “Who can be happy while the wind recounts / its
long sagas of sorrow?” Her rhymed and measured stanzas would vanish soon
after the war. So would the humanizing of nature, but not its witness to human
ill.
Wherever calamity takes place, nature holds out someplace to turn. Yeats
counters the violent Irish rebellion with a “living stream,” moorhens calling
moorcocks. Edward Thomas tracks a kestrel overhead the week German shells
kill him in 1917. From World War I trenches, Isaac Rosenberg hears “night ring-
ing with unseen larks.” If you ask “why his poems / don’t tell us of dreams, and
leaves, / and great volcanoes in his native land,” writes Pablo Neruda (another
inspiration for Levertov), “Come see / the blood in the streets” of Spain’s civil
war. Robert Lowell fearing nuclear war gazes at an “orange and black / oriole ’s
swinging nest.” An Arab woman’s “kilo of ripe figs” counterbalances the day’s
crushing news in Shirley Kaufman’s Jerusalem.
Levertov’s Vietnam-era collection The Sorrow Dance struggles to imagine
how once, “water buffalo stepped surely along terraces” and “peaceful clouds
were reflected in the paddies.” Then “bombs smashed those mirrors.”

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space

in our bodies along with all we

go on knowing of joy, of love.

Honesty taking on the brunt of awareness—a form of responsibility.
“The Pulse,” seaside and intimate, barely seems to concern Vietnam.
Sealed inside the anemone
in the dark, I knock my head
on steel petals
curving inward around me.