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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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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
Dream
Pared
Ends
Clipped
Like
Toenails
Frivolity
Split
Splits
Dreams
Hair

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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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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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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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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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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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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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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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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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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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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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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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