Born in 1923 in Ilford, Essex, Denise Levertov spent her early years in frequent solitude absorbing the English countryside. Educated by her mother, a Welsh writer and painter, she was introduced to many of the great poets and novelists at a young age. Levertov's father, a Russian Jew of Hasidic background, introduced her to religion and spirituality in the form of mysticism. Levertov's family was quite politically active during the Second World War; her parents worked on behalf of German and Austrian refugees and protested against fascism and injustice.
Levertov knew she wanted to be a poet from a young age, receiving advice and encouragement from T.S. Eliot when she was twelve. Her first poem was published when she was seventeen. The poet's early work has been praised as containing a language of effortlessly defined and direct beauty. Later on in her life, Levertov would become involved in civil disobedience and protest against the Vietnam War, taking this socio-political and justice-seeking element into her work.
I learned a great deal about Denise Levertov as both a poet and a person from her book "Life in the Forest." The way the book was structured, with the intentional sequencing of five sections, allows for each section to be linked by deeply human themes which are developed throughout. In her introduction to the book, the poet writes of her intentions in developing the sections of the book as a means to explore more expansive ways of writing, and suggests alternate ways of reading the work to find unity between the poems and sections.
After looking into Levertov's biography, I found that around the time "Life in the Forest" was published, the poet had gone through both the divorce of her husband and the death of her mother. This realization helped me to better understand and connect with many of the poems in a way which would not have been possible otherwise.
The first section of the book, entitled Homage to Pavese, begins with a poem of expansive language and beautiful images in resonance with the title and later themes of the book. Levertov uses the metaphor of a human being walking to represent the mind in awe of beauty - the beauty which is not only ecstasy, but grief as well. I think Levertov was implying that "the forest" or wilderness or nature of the soul, and attempting to understand the world from childhood on, is like walking along a fine line -
"a ledge of slippery stone in the world's woods
deep-layered with wet leaves - rich or sad: on one
side of the path, ecstasy, on the other
dull grief" (3).
At the center of this poem lies profound insight fueled by the fires of the poet's wisdom - speaking the truth that although innocent creatures such as children and animals suffer and die without comprehending why, "human being" continues venturing into the unknown, floating down the river of life. I was fascinated by the mysterious nature of this poem, and it urged me to continue reading and exploring to find what would come next.
After the mystifying opening poem, the first section moves on to explore personal reflection in the depictions of strangers, finding insight through social interaction and encounters with others. Levertov manages to provide deeply personal lyric poetry even with the use of techniques such as referring to herself in the third person, and maintaining a distance in her writing at which the reader can compare to how one might view a stranger.
This combination of self-as-stranger, and the intimacy with which the poet depicts the people she meets in her travels builds a foundation and direction for the subsequent poems of the book. I knew by the end of the first section that these poems represented a poet and person of many complexities, and the beauty and simplicity of the words exploring both a personal life and the lives of others showed me a deep compassion at the root the writing.
In the final three poems of Homage to Pavese, the poet moves from the third person exploration of the lives of others, to writing in the first-person about the death of her mother. Parallels between the language and themes of the poem "A Mystery (Oaxaca, Mexico)," and "The 90th Year" were quite clear - with the focus of the former as a portrait of a vendor who finds meaning in his work despite being very elderly, and the latter as a portrait of the poet's ninety-year-old mother despite being frail and sickly continuing to do household tasks because they give the day its pattern.
The poet's beautiful description of a a village in Oaxaca helped me connect with Levertov's personal life even more when I learned that she and her mother had spent many years in Mexico.
In the following poem, "A Daughter (I)," the poet explores the pain and death of her mother. Through a third-person narrative voice, the poet looks back on her own life in remembrance of her relationship and past interactions with her mother.Sensing a deep personal conflict and sorrow, I imagined how it might have been easier for the poet to write about this painful subject by looking back on her own life from a distance.
In "A Daughter (II)," the poet returns to a first-person narrative, and using the image of traveling in a jet as a metaphor for moving forward in time, pauses to look back on the times she spent with her dying mother with a great deal of regret and pain.
The final poem of the section, "Death in Mexico," gives the image and metaphor of a garden slowly withering and vanishing along with the death of the poet's mother. The poem ends with a sense that bitterness, regret, and nostalgia are irrelevant in the face of eternity. The death of the poet's mother taking place far from home in Mexico very effectively paralleled the foreignness of the pain of loss in the tone of the poem.
The book's second section - Continuum, lived up to its title. the nature of the poems in this section not only lamented the death of the poet's mother, but praised her life as well. I noticed the poet moving on from the subject and images of grief with the poem "Talking to Grief," in which sorrow is welcomed in to the poet's house like a stray dog. This seemed to represent a certain uneasy peace made with heartache.
The poem "Earliest Spring" shows the poet's remembrance of how her mother taught her to pause and see beauty in life through the image of sharing the beauty of a newly sprouted garden.
The poems "Emblem (I)" and "Emblem (II)" depict two separate dreams filled with wilderness and nature imagery. The former shows an expansive feeling of aloneness in a forest heath, and the latter poem shows a cocoon struggling to open but constrained by oppressive grief.
In the rest of the section, the poet continues to move between spiritual and philosophical elements, returning to to images of nature as metaphors for both doubt and praise.
The final poems of the section arrive at the socio-political realm, although they contain deeply personal elements. In "The Long Way Round," the poet writes about how she learned about herself and her own true identity through witnessing the the struggles of Vietnamese and African-American women - opening up her eyes to the pain and agony of oppression based on skin color. This gave the poet a sense of her own desire to truly connect with people and speak out against injustice.
The third section, Modulations for Solo Voice, contains some of the most complex and experimental poems of the book. Although many of the poems in this section seemed abstract and were difficult for me to grasp, I found some distinct elements that provided continuity with the themes of the previous sections. After several poems relating her love for great authors such as Anton Checkhov to her personal relationships, the poet returns to the theme of nature, with the comparison the decay and aging of her own body to a wilting flower.
In one of the final poems entitled "Modulations," the poet returns to and connects three of the main themes of the book - human beings, nature, and justice.
"The vision / of river, of nectarine, is not mine only. / All humankind, women and men, / hungry, / hungry beyond hunger / for food, for justice, / pick themselves up and stumble on / for this: to transcend barriers, longing / for absolution of each by each, luxurious unlearning / of lies and fears, / for joy, that throws down the reins / on the neck of / the divine animal / who carries us through the world"(84,85).
Before "Life in the Forest" was published, Denise Levertov had gone though both the death of her mother and the divorce of her husband. This double-trauma adds to the poignancy of her poems using metaphors and imagery of nature in the form of desolate heaths and constricting cocoons. In the final sections of the book, Levertov continues to touch on the subject of lost love, but moves in a direction which suggests a realization of identity through solitude.
The title poem concludes with the image of a woman who finds refuge in a forest - a woman who finds peace in Eternity but refuses to allow the Eternal to enter her house when it knocks on her door after it left her to go wandering. She remains safe within her shelter.
I had never read a full book of poetry before "Life in the Forest," but Levertov's simple but beautiful words and distinct sections helped me to connect with what I felt was something transcendent in the vast spiritual elements I encountered. Journeying through the poems of this book made me feel like I was beginning to know the poet, but also that I was getting to know my own self in a more profound way - thus better understanding what it means to be a human-being. I believe that Levertov's depicitons of both common and extraordinary elements of human existence might have had this in mind when she compiled the poems in "Life in the Forest." I encourage anyone who is willing to venture into the wilderness of poetry and human nature to explore this book.
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