Levertov: ‘The Secret’

 Denise Levertov’s “The Secret” begins:

Two girls discover

the secret of life

in a sudden line of 

poetry. 

 

I who don’t know the

secret wrote

the line. 

 

The poem is about an approach to life. It’s not a philosophy or a religion, but something more basic. It’s an attitude that you have about your relationship with the world, a confidence that you can find good things in it.

The poet knows that the girls will soon forget the secret of life that they found in the poem. They’ll forget the poet who wrote it. But the poet loves them for finding it, for loving her for writing it, for forgetting it, and for finding the secret of life again in new lines of poetry and in new happenings.

 

And for

wanting to know it,

for 

 

assuming there is

such a secret, yes,

for that

most of all.

 

Levertov said, “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”

This writing has that quality, I think. 

Like the girls in the poem, I had forgotten (almost) how good Levertov is.

• Source: Denise Levertov’s “The Secret” is at the Poetry Foundation’s site:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48725/the-secret-56d22a326e5a8