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A Connection to Poetry
The Stream and the Sapphire:
Selected Poems on Religious Themes
by Denise Levertov, New Directions, 1997.
Reviewed by Anthony Chiffolo
Maybe it sounds corny nowadays to talk about having a favorite poet. Poetry, after all, is not much in vogue anymore. People don’t recite poetry--don’t memorize verse--don’t know poets. Who can even name our poet laureate? Yet corny as it might be, I grieved over the 1997 death of Denise Levertov--and not just because new poems won’t be spilling forth from her soul to startle me with her vision. I grieved also because I lost a personal connection to Poetry.
It began in 1978. I was a freshman in college, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, taking a course in Poetry. As well as the old standards, we read Roethke and Snyder and Plath, enthralled by their differences. But I was completely taken over by Levertov, and her poems about relationships were a revelation. I admit, at the age of eighteen I was, to use a nautical phrase, out to sea when it came to forming and maintaining connections with other people, my difficulty certainly made more stultifying by my increasing awareness of my homosexuality, my increasing fear of discovery by the unsympathetic military, and the increasing strength, consequently, of my denial. Poetry--reading it, that is; I could never write the stuff--was a refuge, an outlet, a window to a universe where everything was possible, or at least imaginable. And Levertov’s poems translated my feelings into words. I’ve never forgotten a line from one of them: "two by two in the ark of the ache of it." During my years of denial it always seemed the only way that relationships could be.
Through that course I reveled in Levertov’s nature poetry. I also enjoyed her anti-Vietnam War writings because it made me feel good to be "rebellious" in this way. And I wrote to her--even now it gives me a charge to think of it. I didn’t say much, only that I admired her work and was doing a presentation about it for the class. I asked half a dozen inane questions about poetry, such as What is organic form? and How do you use it? And I guess I expected a reply.
Well, wasn’t I thrilled to get the brown envelope with her response! She was so considerate, answering my queries at length in her personal hand--all except one, which I hadn’t expressed very clearly. It was as if the Divine had touched my life, briefly. I still have that letter, treasuring it among my precious papers.
Undergraduate years passed, and along the way I referred occasionally to her poems, for inspiration or release, delving into The Freeing of the Dust and other collections. But there were more practical matters to attend to, and reading poetry took a backseat to electrical engineering and drill on the parade ground and the other rigors of life as a midshipman.
Oddly enough, my last semester found me dating a poet--at least, she wrote beautiful poetry. We never quite figured out what we meant to each other, but she managed to understand me pretty well, even if I was clueless about her. So for a graduation gift she gave me an Italian cookbook and a signed copy of The Jacob’s Ladder. She had gone up to New York from Maryland and asked Levertov to personalize the book for me. I was floored by their generosity!
Then a few days later, the mails brought a package with Levertov’s return address: another book. This was not a volume of her own poetry but a collection of essays and songs and photos. Peace Is Our Profession it was called. And with the book was a handwritten note from Levertov, in which she expressed ambiguous feelings about my graduating from the Naval Academy. On the one hand, she was sorry I was going into the military profession. On the other hand, she was glad I was out of the Academy’s rigid environment. In any case, she urged me to remember her own antiwar sentiments as I began my military career.
We never had any more direct personal encounters, but our spirits did cross paths again. During a graduate English class, taken while I was still serving in the Navy, I read Norman Mailer’s account of the Vietnam War protest march in Washington, D.C., and he wrote of how Levertov inspired him and the other marchers with her antiwar poetry. Around the same time, I found her "For Instance" in the Amicus Journal, a poem that speaks so eloquently of loving the earth that it continues to evoke memories of special times I have experienced during woodland or seaside treks, to conjure up those experiences that have become holy across time: "Oh Earth, belovéd Earth!"
Then I recently happened upon The Stream and the Sapphire: Selected Poems on Religious Themes. This is a surprising collection of Levertov’s poems about faith and the spiritual life--surprising, for Levertov was a woman whom I had thought least likely to have anything to do with religion. As soon as I began the first poem--"Human being--walking / in doubt from childhood on . . ."--I was hooked, for she had already encapsulated my journey of faith. And so I began traveling with her once more.
The poems are arranged mostly chronologically, so they trace the blossoming of Levertov’s spirituality. True, it is not necessarily a traditional religious awareness. Hers was not a pious faith. It was not a tranquil faith. Rather, it was a faith that challenges, that questions, that searches, that fears and dares and starts and stops and rages and complains and hopes and perseveres and loves and never gives up.
Levertov’s spirit, living on through these religious poems, communicates something true to me and about me. They enable me to perceive, for a moment anyway, the divine spark that is both within and without--that is, the source and goal of all life.
Consider these lines from the poem "Annunciation":
Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?
Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.
More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
Her feelings about the call of the Spirit and the desire to know God are completely familiar to me. This is how I feel about my life of faith. But more than that, the poem probes my complacencies, forcing me to confront anew the authenticity of my life and causing me to wonder if the door is really closed for always.
Many of the poems in this book are masterpieces of spiritual pithiness and can stand worthily alongside the verse of some of the great Christian mystics. For example, this poem, titled "The Avowal," serves me as both a prayer and a mantra:
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirits deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
Like Levertov, I would like to learn to trust God enough to make that mighty leap!
Essentially, for her and for me, it all comes down to giving up our reservations about the Resurrection. Here are the closing lines of "On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus":
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that “with God
all things
are possible,”
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.
She knows how impossible it is to believe in the Resurrection as a concept, but how easy to believe when one has firsthand experience of a resurrection. For this above all, I am grateful for The Stream and the Sapphire, for in resurrecting my connection with my friend Denise Levertov this book has helped me embrace the joy of resurrection life.
Anthony F. Chiffolo is the author of 100 Names of Mary: Stories & Prayers, published by St. Anthony Messenger Press. He is managing editor at Fordham University Press and reviews books for WVOX Radio, 1460 AM, in New Rochelle, New York, and for community newsletters. Chiffolo is also the author of Be Mindful of Us: Prayers to the Saints, the An Hour with the Saints series of pamphlets, and other books from Liguori Publications. He lives in Hartsdale, New York.
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