Denis Levertov: Life and Works

Denis Levertov: Life and Works Denise Levertov is a poet of much contradiction and contrast, both in the details f her biography and in her poems. Jewsih by heritage and Anglican by upbringing, religion plays a major role in her poetry, though it does not seem to have played a huge importance in the purely practical considerations of her life. Her father Paul Levertoff was a Hassidic Jew that emigrated from Russia to England early in the twentieth century and married Beatrice Spooner-Jones, Levertov's Welsh mother.

Her father converted to Chirstianity and became an Anglican pastor, so Levertov's upbringing was an amalgam of cultural and religious backgrounds, with the effect that she began to see things as impermanent and always subject to interpretation. This was strengthened and nurtured by the trends in literature, criticism, and especially poetry that were occurring during Levertov's youth and as she grew into her identity as a writer.

To further complicate her sense of identity, Levertov married an Amercican and moved to New York, which would become her primary place of residence for the remainder of her life. Though originally brought up in the traditional schools of thought and writing, Levertov was quickly engaged and influenced by the more experimental poetry of the Black Mountain poets she discovered in America, particularly William Carlos Williams.

Her style began shifting to reflect the ideas and styles of her new home country, and her poetry began to be recognized as the works of genius which they are regarded as today. Some common themes of her work are nature imagery coupled with a paradoxical sense of connectivity and loneliness.

Religion, God, and other concepts of divinity receive similar treatments in many of her poems, as though holiness is at once a part of everything and a terrible force to awesome to be looked on, leaving one feeling outside and alone. Three poems in particular illustrate her contradictions. In "To the Snake," Levertov addresses the beast of the title in tones that are at once seductive and chastising. The speaker comes across as almost playfully ruminating on their own destruction.

The first two stanzas start by directly addressing the creature with the words "Green Snake," making the speaker sound rather childish, identifying the snake in its simplest term of description -- that of color. Green is also a very symbolic color, however; in America, it is the color of money, and therefore also of greed. Since used in Othello (and possibly before), green has also been associated with envy and jealousy, concepts related to but not exactly the same as greed.

Lastly, and perhaps most universally, green is associated with nature. This calls to mind the symbolism of the snake, which of course reminds Western readers of the Garden of Eden. In this poem, then, the snake is a symbol of temptation and destruction, which helps to explain the poems tone. The speaker's intrigue with such a dichotomy -- the promise and richness of the snake mingled with the uncertainty and fear of destruction -- is indicative of Levertov's general bent towards the seemingly-contradictory in her work.

Caedmon," too, contains some of this sense of contradictory juxtaposition, especially in the line towards the end of the poem where the speaker reflects that she "was at home and lonely, / both in good measure" (23-4). In the poem, the speaker (presumably a child, as she learned early to do what she describes doing) quietly leaves a dance for which she feels inadequate and goes to sit amongst the cows and other livestock in the barn, who "munched or stirred or were still" (22).

She stays here peacefully until an angel of fire awakes her and draws her back into the dance. It is unclear exactly what this angel is supposed to represent, or even if it is to be taken symbolically. What is clear, however, is the equal measures of the speaker's -- and Levertov's -- passion and placidity.

Though not at home in the dance at first, the speaker eventually leaves the calm and quiet of the barn to return there, and there seems to be a kinship between herself and the fire, and/or the angels, when she realizes that "nothing was burning, / nothing but I, as that hand of fire / touched my lips" (29-31).Again, the contradiction of the two extremes in this poem both find a home within or around the speaker's body.

One of the titles of Levertov's early collections is the Jacob's Ladder, and the title poem from that work contains more directly religious imagery than the other two poems discussed here. The title itself refers to the ladder to.