‘literalists of the imagination,’
poets or not,
that miracle
is possible,
possible and essential.
Are some intricate minds
nourished
on concept,
as epiphytes flourish
high in the canopy?
Can they
subsist on the light,
on the half
of metaphor that’s not
grounded in dust, grit,
heavy
carnal clay?
Do signs contain and utter,
for them
all the reality
that they need? Resurrection, for them,
an internal power, but not
a matter of flesh?
For the others,
of whom I am one,
miracles (ultimate need, bread
of life) are miracles just because
people so tuned
to the humdrum laws:
gravity, mortality—
can’t open
to symbols power
unless convinced of its ground,
its roots
in bone and blood.
We must feel
the pulse in the wound
to believe
that ‘with God
all things
are possible,’
taste
bread at Emmaus
that warm hands
broke and blessed.
St. Thomas Didymus
In the hot street at noon I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
beyond the crowd’s buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
teethgnashing son,
and thought him my brother.
I heard him cry out, weeping, and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
mine unbelief,
and knew him
my twin:
a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tightdrawn question,
Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn, twisted?
Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born?
The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out.
After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and patient. To others
I seemed well enough.
So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man—
even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
to lift me—
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the same: Lord,
I believe,
help thou, nine unbelief.
I needed
blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through
to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
the battle I fought with life
But when my hand
led by His hands firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my
obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.
Ascension
Stretching Himself as if again,
through downpress of dust
upward, soil giving way
to thread of white, that reaches
for daylight, to open as green
leaf that it is …
Can Ascension
not have been
arduous, almost,
as the return
from Sheol, and
back through the tomb
into breath?
Matter reanimate
now must relinquish
itself, its
human cells,
molecules, five
senses, linear
vision endured
as Man —
the sole
all-encompassing gaze
resumed now,
Eye of Eternity.
Relinquished, earth’s
broken Eden.
Expulsion,
liberation,
last
self-enjoined task
of Incarnation.
He again
Fathering Himself.
Seed-case
splitting.
He again
Mothering His birth:
torture and bliss.
Notes
“The Holy One, blessed be he…” and “I learned that her name was Proverb”: These two poems are part of a series of “Spinoffs,” from Breathing the Water (1987). They “span off” from photographs by Peter McAfee Brown when I was preparing to write an introduction to his book, Seasons of Light. They should not be mistaken for descriptions.
“Candlemas”: This poem draws on a sermon given by Father Benignus at Stanford, Candlemas 1985.
“Agnus Dei”: From Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus.
“On a Theme by Thomas Merton”: the theme alluded to is in one of the tapes of informal lectures given at Gethsemane in the 1960s.
“Variation on a Theme by Rilke (Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 4)”: Those who read German will be able to see what images and ideas are taken from the original and which are my own.
“Caedmon”: The story comes, of course, from The Venerable Bede’s History of the Enqlish Church and People, but I first read it as a child in John Richard Green’s History of the English People, 1855. The poem forms a companion piece to “St. Peter and the Angel” in The Stream & the Sapphire as well as in Oblique Prayers.
“The Servant-Girl at Emmaus”: The painting by Velázquez is in the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. Before it was cleaned, the subject was not apparent: only when the figures at table in a
room behind her were revealed was her previously ambiguous expression clearly legible as acutely attentive.
“Conversion of Brother Lawrence”: The quotations are from Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God (available in many editions), and the biographical allusions are based on the original introductions.
“The Showings”: The quotations are taken from the Pelican and the Paulist Press Classics of Western Spirituality editions.
“On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX”: This is from the longer text of Julian of Norwich’s Showings (or Revelations). The quoted lines follow the Grace Warrack transcription (1901). Warrack uses the word “kinship” in her title-heading for the chapter, though in the text itself she says “kindness,” thus—as in her Glossary—reminding one of the roots common to both words.
BOOKS BY DENISE LEVERTOV
Poetry
The Double Image
Here and Now
Overland to the Islands
With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads
The Jacob’s Ladder
O Taste and See
The Sorrow Dance
Relearning the Alphabet
To Stay Alive
Footprints
The Freeing of the Dust
Life in the Forest
Collected Earlier Poems 1940–1960
Candles in Babylon
Poems 1960–1967
Oblique Prayers
Poems 1968–1972
Breathing the Water
A Door in the Hive
Evening Train
Sands of the Well
The Life Around Us
The Stream and the Sapphire
This Great Unknowing: Last Poems
Prose
New & Selected Essays
Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions
The Letters of Denise Levertov & William Carlos Williams
Translations
Guillevic/Selected Poems
Joubert/Black Iris (Copper Canyon Press)
Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985,
1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997
by Denise Levertov
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
The Stream and the Sapphire incorporates poems from seven previous Denise Levertov books with New Directions: The Sands of the Well (1996), Evening Train (1992). A Door in the Hive (1989), Breathing the Water (1987), Oblique Prayers (1984), Candles in Babylon (1982), and Life in the Forest (1978).
Designed by Sylvia Frezzolini Severance
First published clothbound and as New Directions Paperbook 844 in 1997
Published simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Books Canada Limited
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Levertov, Denise, 1923-
The stream and the sapphire : selected poems on religious themes /
Denise Levertov.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-811-22240-2 (e-book)
1. Religious poetry, American. 1. Title.
PS3562.E8876A6 1997
811’.54—dc2l
96—30012
CIP
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011
The Stream & the Sapphire Page 4