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Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Empty
Tear
Tears
Burned
Tree
Hang
Forget
Dress
Dresses
Wear
Limp
Clean
Scarlet
Green
Lemons

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
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There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
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Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.
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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
Denise Levertov
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them let a boat be kept there.
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our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
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An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
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In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.
Denise Levertov