272 PART THREE
Her sense of peril stuns us all the more, lodged in a colorful invertebrate. Then
the “petals,” really tentacles, open onto radiant images,
the air they call water,
saline, dawngreen over its sands,
resplendent with fishes.
All day it is morning,
all night the glitter
of all that shines out of itself
crisps the vast swathes of the current.
But my feet are weighted:
only my seafern arms
my human hands
my fingers tipped with fire
sway out into the world.Free for just this moment, she says “I sing.” But
the petals creak and
begin to rise.
They rise and recurl
to a bud ’s form
and clamp shut.
I wait in the dark.Rather than blatant horror, she shuts her anemone bud on what can’t be
expressed.
“Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means
than shock.” Levertov in 1959 says that poems, no matter if driven by dread
or outrage, must keep an “inner harmony.” She held to a basic principle for
poetry, organic form, passing from Coleridge and Emerson through Whitman,
Hopkins, and others. Poems of environmental awakening give that much more
weight to the word “organic.” Robert Frost ’s apple-picking, William Stafford ’s
“sharp swallows in their swerve,” Levertov’s anemone petals evolve a growth
of their own: “form is never more than a revelationof content.”
Here we see “the most powerful influence on my poetry,” William Carlos
Williams. In his “Young Sycamore,” a single free-verse sentence exfoliates from
trunk to tip, shaping a new sense of this tree. “Spring and All” moves through
“dried weeds” until newly rooted plants “grip down and begin to awaken.”
Arriving in the United States in 1948, Levertov came to value the idiomatic
speech in Williams’s poems, his local (New Jersey) inspiration, and “a Francis-
can sense of wonder” at common things that “deepened for me... some latent