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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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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
Living
Death
Breathing
Next
Speaking
Moments
Air
Life
Spring
Mistake
Moment
Moving

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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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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.
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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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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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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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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 -
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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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Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
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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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But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
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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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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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.
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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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