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Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

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
Abandon
Dues
Lack
Capacity
Perhaps
Imagination
Faith
Much
Mediocrity

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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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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
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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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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
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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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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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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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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.
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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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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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
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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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And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
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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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But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
Denise Levertov
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
Denise Levertov
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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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.
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