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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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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
Thinking
Burns
Chill
Blue
Bead
Heard
Wick
Sometimes
Soot
Different
Chills
Heart
Beads
Think
Apollo

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
Denise Levertov
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
Denise Levertov
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
Denise Levertov
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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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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
Denise Levertov
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains themso would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.
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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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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.
Denise Levertov