Tag Archives: Denise Levertov

A Young Black Servant Intently Listening

In another of her Easter poems, Levertov focusing on the servant serving the Emmaus dinner.

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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.

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Can We Love the Morning Again?

In this poem Levertov talks about the difficulties of loving the morning again after a night of horrors.

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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.

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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.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Share Hope and Watch It Grow

New Year’s Day Former colleague Dana Greene alerted me to this luminescent New Year’s poem by Denise Levertov. In it, the poet compares hope to a small crystal and a cluster of irises. When Emily Dickinson describes hope as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she focuses on the individual. Hope comes […]

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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.

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