Denise Levertov wrote many poems with unworldly themes throughout her career. For example, respect for nature and life, nothingness and absence, and despair with the world. There were also positive ideas and images about peace in death, the wandering search, gratitude for giving, wonder at mystery, and the dance of delight.

It is as if she has been prompted to ask spiritual questions out of a growing awareness of the tensions in the world and her relationship to it.

Denise levertov

In 1997, the year of his death at age 74, he assembled a collection of 38 of these poems previously published in The Stream & The Sapphire, published by New Directions Publishing Corporation, New York.

Denise Levertov’s life

Denise Levertov was born in 1923 and raised in Ilford Essex. His mother came from a small mining town in North Wales. His father, a Russian Hasidic Jew, emigrated to the UK and became an Anglican priest after converting to Christianity. During World War II, she became a civilian nurse who served in London during the bombings. In 1947 she married Mitchell Goodman, an American writer, and a year later they moved to the United States.

Denise Levertov’s inner development

It seems that she valued her spiritual religious doubts and uncertainties as a way to find her way through the maze of life. However, for example, in St. Thomas Didymus, in line with his inner development, his writing began to show the idea that nothingness and darkness were no longer things to doubt and agonize over. What was a persistent worry turns into something positive.

Denise Levertov’s Religious Consciousness

During the course of his life, his poems tend to stop constantly questioning religion to simply accept it. And so later the content became more overtly religious as his own beliefs slowly developed from agnosticism, through constant questioning of religion, to acceptance of the Christian faith. She wrote that this was a movement that incorporated many doubts and questions, as well as affirmations.

As the developing religious consciousness began to be reflected in Denise Levertov’s poetry, I remember what the philosopher James Pratt wrote. He wrote about an intuitive sense of the presence of a life larger than his own. This presence is said to be like a very happy feeling to be with another person, even though you cannot actually see, hear or feel that person.

She wrote about this mysterious presence in terms of its absence:

From On a Subject by Thomas Merton

“The revolving walks dazzle him, the lights blind him. Fragmented, he is not present for himself. God suffers the emptiness that is his absence.”

Aren’t we also dazzled by the fast-moving world filled with exhilarating technology demanding our attention so that we are unaware of the absence of God’s spirit within our soul? No wonder we are prone to despair over the futility of it all.

He said that when he began to write explicitly Christian poems, he thought he would lose some of his readers. But that really hadn’t. His sense of spiritual hunger was a kind of counterforce or unconscious reaction to the technological euphoria.

Denise Levertov’s Christian Faith

He also said that when you are really stuck writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. She wasn’t very good at praying, but what she said she experienced when she was writing a poem was close to prayer. He felt it to different degrees and not with every poem.

She compares religious faith to the ebb and flow of the tide.

Of the tide

“Faith is a tide, it seems, it ebbs and flows in response to action and inaction.”

As she reflects on the need to strive to focus her attention on God and what she calls God’s embrace, she also seems to be able to tolerate not knowing all the answers and accept the paradoxes of faith.

In her writing, in my opinion, Denise Levertov illustrates what the spiritual philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg held is true religious enlightenment. This is a gift of insight from God received by those who:

– humble search for spiritual meaning
– love what is true for the sake of truth
– I want to be really useful in life
– appeal to spiritual values ​​over and above the natural desires of life

Copyright 2014 Stephen Russell-Lacy