Denise Levertov
(The anti-nuclear die-in, Wash., D.C., and the official
shutdown of the Seabrook Plant, June 1978)
Over our scattered tents by night
lightning and thunder called to us.
Fierce rain blessed us,
catholic, all-encompassing.
We walked through blazing morning
into the city of law,
of corrupt order, of invested power.
By day and by night
we sat in the dust,
on the cement pavement we sat down and sang.
In the noon of a long day, sharing the work of the play,
we died together, enacting
the death by which all
shall perish unless we act.
***
Solitaries drew close, releasing
each solitude into its blossoming.
We gave to each other the roses
of our communion—
A culture of gardens, horticulture not agribusiness
arbors among the lettuce, and small terrains.
***
When we tasted the small, ephemeral
harvest of our striving,
great power flowed from us,
luminous, a promise. Yes!…
great energy flowed from solitude,
and great power from communion.
Denise Levertov grew up in London, England. When she was twelve, Levertov sent some of her poetry to T. S. Eliot, who responded with two pages of “excellent advice” and encouragement to continue writing. At age seventeen she had her first poem published, in Poetry Quarterly. During World War II, Levertov became a civilian nurse serving in London throughout the bombings. She published her first book, The Double Image, in 1946, which brought her recognition as a “New Romantic.”
After marrying the American writer, Mitchell Goodman, the two moved to the U.S. in 1948. Through her husband’s friendship with Robert Creeley, she became associated with the Black Mountain poets, particularly Creeley, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan. Levertov acknowledged these influences, but disclaimed membership in any poetic school. She moved away from the fixed forms of English practice, developing an open, experimental style. With the publication of her first American book, Here and Now (1956), she became an important voice in the American avant-garde. Her poems of the fifties and sixties won her immediate and excited recognition, not just from peers like Creeley and Duncan, but also from the avant-garde poets of an earlier generation, such as Kenneth Rexroth and William Carlos Williams.
Her next book, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (1959), established her as one of the great American poets, and her British origins were soon forgotten. She was poetry editor of The Nation magazine in 1961 and from 1963 to 1965. During the 1960s, activism and feminism became prominent in her poetry. During this period she produced one of her most memorable works of rage and sadness, The Sorrow Dance (1967), which encompassed her feelings toward the war and the death of her older sister. From 1975 to 1978, she was poetry editor of Mother Jones magazine.
Levertov went on to publish more than twenty volumes of poetry, including The Freeing of the Dust (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She also authored four books of prose, most recently Tesserae (1995), and translated three volumes of poetry, among them Jean Joubert’s Black Iris (1989). From 1982 to 1993, she taught at Stanford University. She spent the last decade of her life in Seattle, during which time she published Poems 1968-1972 (1987), Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), and The Sands of the Well (1996). Levertov passed away in December of 1997 at the age of seventy-four. New Directions has published more than thirty of Levertov’s books, most recently, The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov in 2013.
This poem was later included in Making Peace, published by New Directions (2006).
Reprinted with permission of Paul A. Lacey, the Executor for the Estate of Denise Levertov.