In another of her Easter poems, Levertov focusing on the servant serving the Emmaus dinner.
Tag Archives: Denise Levertov
A Young Black Servant Intently Listening
Move Past Trump, Embrace the Morning
Life after Trump could be like emerging from an abusive relationship. Emily Bronte concludes “Wuthering Heights” with a useful image.
Can We Love the Morning Again?
In this poem Levertov talks about the difficulties of loving the morning again after a night of horrors.
The Dark World of the Suicidal
The suicide della Vigna in Dante’s Wood of Suicides is a noble man who, however, has lost touch with God.
Scraping One’s Knees on Jacob’s Ladder
Denise Levertov draws on the Jacob’s dream about a stairway to heaven to capture poetry’s transcendent qualities.
Lent: The Air Heavy and Thick
Spiritual Sunday I share today a good Lenten poem by Denise Levertov where the poet finds herself in a funk, albeit not a dramatic funk. She’s experiencing neither a “dark night of the soul” nor a scorching wasteland desert, those extreme moments of crisis that have pushed people to revelation. (Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’s […]
What I Heard Was My Whole Self
Spiritual Sunday Today’s Gospel reading concerns Jesus’s awakening as he was being baptized by John. That moment was his own epiphany, when the membrane between the sacred and the profane was penetrated and he realized that God dwells within us (Luke 3:21-22): Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been […]
Spirituality in Nature
John Gatta’s “Spirit of Place in American Literary Culture” explains why we find certain places, in nature and in civilization, to be infused with spirit.