Tag Archives: Denise Levertov

The Dark World of the Suicidal

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2020

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

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2020

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

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2019

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

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2019

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

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2019

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

By Robin Bates | Published: October 13, 2018

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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A Vast Unfolding Design Lit by a Risen Sun

By Robin Bates | Published: April 8, 2018

Denise Levertov’s magnificent poem about Doubting Thomas graphically describes the doubts, making the final revelation all the more powerful.

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Filled with Some Other Power

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2018

Denise Levertov’s beautiful poem “The Well” works as a commentary on John’s gospel account of the Samaritan woman at the well.

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A Pause in Time and the Soul’s Awareness

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2018

John Thorkild Ellison has two Epiphany poems in which the spirit enters when the poet has all but given up hope.

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