Levertov: ‘Freedom’

 Yesterday’s note suggested that Denise Levertov’s poems often have the quality of prayer. Her poem “Freedom” is an example: 

Perhaps we humans

have wanted God as witness

to acts of choice

made in solitude. Acts of mercy,

of sacrifice. Wanted

that great single eye to see us,

steadfast as we flow by.

 

Levertov wants none of that. If there’s communion with the divine, it’s not an impulse to look inward but to look outward.

 

Blind

to itself, flooded

with otherness.

 

The poem is from The Freeing of the Dust, and I have been reading my 50-year-old copy, annotated in pencil by a much younger version of me.

I can see that the young reader who made those notes was exploring, just beginning to see what a fine poet was saying, and realizing that she was slyly profound, astonishing.

• Source: Denise Levertov, The Freeing of the Dust; New York: New Directions, 1975, p. 112.