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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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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
Walks
Butterflies
Stem
Butterfly
Dry
Touching
Stunted
Fields
Wand
Paper
Wands
Walk
Stems

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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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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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I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
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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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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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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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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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What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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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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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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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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And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
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