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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

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
Fall
Night
Around
Daytime
Hole
Holes
Grief
Walk
Walks

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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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.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.
Denise Levertov
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And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
Denise Levertov
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my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.
Denise Levertov
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The threat of world's end is the old threat.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
Denise Levertov
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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
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
Denise Levertov
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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.
Denise Levertov
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
Denise Levertov
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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
Denise Levertov
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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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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
Denise Levertov