add to knowledge of the craft of poetry.
Worksheets from the "Olga Poems" are interesting for various reasons. This
particular group of poems poses the problem of controlling sentiment so that the poem is
not obscured by too personal detail. In Poem IV, for example, the account of Olga’s
hospital life originally contained a reference to her fear of swimming, a biographical
comment which seems irrelevant in this particular poem.
In early versions of Poem VI, the line "It was there I tried to teach you to ride
a bicycle" has become, more appropriately, "I would . . . go out to ride my
bike, return." The point to be made is that Olga is persistent, "savagely"
so, in her playing; not that she needed instruction in bicycling.
Early Version:
you turned savagely to the piano and sight-read
straight through all the Beethoven sonatas, day after day—
weeks, it seemed to one. I would turn the pages, some of the time.
It was there I tried to teach you to ride a bicycle.
Final:
you turned savagely to the piano and sight-read
straight through all the Beethoven sonatas, day after day—
weeks, it seemed to me. I would turn the pages some of the time,
go out to ride my bike, return–you were enduring in the
falls and rapids of the music.
In the final draft of the sixth poem again, personal emotion assumes what might be
considered a more subtle expression.
Early Version:
though when we were estranged,
my own eyes smarted in the pain
of remembering you
as they do now, remembering
I shall never see you again
Final:
Even when we were estranged
and my own eyes smarted in pain and anger at the thought of
you.
Toward the end of the poem, the original line "gold brown eyes I shall never see
again" becomes "gold brown eyes." To emphasize the finality of death, as in
these early versions, is to mislead the reader at this point; for Levertov has further to
go in her poetic re-creation. The central image of the late poems is of eyes, Olga’s
golden, mystic eyes–the candle image modified through implication. The closing impression
of the poem sequence is not the poet’s bereavement; it is rather Olga’s unbroken
character.
The sound pattern is particularly compelling in this last poem of the sequence. Yet in
the early version, for all its contextual similarity, the pattern does not exist.
Early Version:
Crossing the wooden bridge over the Roding
where its course divided the open
field of the present
from the mysteries of the past,
the old forest,
I never forgot to think of your eyes
which were the golden brown of
pebbles under the water,
water under the sun.
And crossing
other streams in the world
where the same light
danced among stones
I never forgot …
Final:
Your eyes were the gold brown of pebbles under water.
I never crossed the bridge over the Roding, dividing
the open field of the present from the mysteries,
the wraiths and shifts of time-sense Wanstead Park held
suspended,
without remembering your eyes. Even when we were estranged
and my own eyes smarted in pain and anger at the thought of
you.
And by other streams in other countries; anywhere where the
light
reached down through shallows to gold gravel. Olga’s brown
eyes.
"where the same light/danced among stones/I never forgot . . ." is very far,
in sound, from "anywhere where the light/reached down through shallows to gold
gravel. Olga’s/brown eyes." It is interesting that Levertov has opened this final
version with a thought expressed almost as an aside in the earlier poem.
Similar modifications are evident in the ending of the poem. The final impression is to
be of Olga’s calm yet unappeased eyes. One early version of the poem ends,
… the lashes short but the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of abundant and joyful life in back of them.
Rather than relying on the somewhat set adjectives, abundant and joyful,
the final version suggests the wealth, the ambiguity of those very human eyes:
… the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining,
unknowable gaze.
Often in revision the change is small–perhaps only a word or two–but the effect is
striking. I cite the closing lines of Poem V, for example:
Early Version:
–Oh, in your torn stockings
and unwaved hair
you were riding your anguish down
over the bare fields, soberly, soberly.
Final:
Oh, in your torn stockings, with unwaved hair,
you were trudging after your anguish
over the bare fields, soberly, soberly.
For the passive, tearless Niobe, trudging is a better expression than riding.
The same can be said of the changes made within Poem I. "The red waistband ring"
of the final version was originally written as "itchy skin released from elastic
reddened . . ."; objective detail must be not only accurate but consistent with the
tone and movement of the poem. Tone may also have caused Levertov to delete the reference
to "her kid sister’s room" which appears in the original draft.
Many changes are made for the sake of emphasis. "I never forgot to think of your
eyes" becomes "without remembering your eyes," a phrase much more positive
in a grammatical sense. The movement of the latter phrase is also more suitable to the
poem in which it appears, and rhythm in Levertov’s poems is consistently an important
consideration. For example, there are these lines from Poem V:
Early Version:
… seeing again
the signposts pointing to Theydon Garnon
or Stapleford Abbots or Greensted
crossing the ploughlands whose color I named ‘murple’
a shade between brown and lavender
that we loved
How cold it was in your thin coat,
your down-at-heel
shoes—
Final:
… seeing again
the signposts pointing to Theydon Garnon
or Stapleford Abbots or Greensted,
crossing the ploughlands (whose color I named murple,
a shade between brown and mauve that we loved
when I was a child and you
not much more than a child) finding new lanes
near White Roding and Abbess Roding, or lost in Romford’s
new streets where there were footpaths then—
[. . . .]
Beginning with trampled grass, Levertov in the final draft suggests the struggle
present in Olga’s relationships with others, intensified later by stung and lash.
Alien helps to revivify the somewhat overused puppet metaphor, as does the figure
"rehearsed fates." An intermediate version of this passage is closer to the
final, but the phrasing is awkward:
Pacing across the trampled lawn you were,
where your actors, older than you but assembled and driven
to intense semblances alien to them by your will’s fury
had rehearsed their parts.
So far as arrangement of the total poem is concerned, Poem IV (the slow hospital
sequence) and Poem V were reversed, earlier. The present arrangement is more effective
rhythmically: the hospital passage provides needed contrast before the last two poems
build to the high pitch of the ending. As Levertov’s comments about the sequence form
indicate, a poet working with several elements may well have no preconception of total
form. Once the parts are written, he must then find the most telling arrangement for the
whole.
From Denise Levertov. New York: Twayne Publsihers, Inc, 1967. Copyright ? 1967
by Twayne Publishers, Inc. Reprinted by Permission of the Author.
Suzanne Juhasz
The nature of Levertov’s political consciousness is indicated by the fact
that these first political poems are an elegy for her sister, a sister who was,
indeed, long before Denise Levertov, a political person.
The poems reveal Levertov trying to come to terms with her dead sister?particularly
with the relationship that existed between them. Olga, the elder: fierce,
passionate, anguished, dedicated, wanting "to change the course of the
river" (iii); Denise, the younger: "the little sister / beady-eyed in
the bed" (i), watching, following, not understanding, yet loving. The poems
are a series of memories (meditations) about Olga, which constantly indicate the
fascination of the elder sister for the younger as well as the accompanying
disapproval:
Everything flows
she muttered into my childhood . . .
I looked up from my Littlest Bear’s cane armchair
and knew the words came from a book
and felt them alien to me
(iii)
Many years of such observation allows her to characterize Olga with exquisite
insight:
. . . dread
was in her, a bloodbeat, it was against the rolling dark
oncoming river she raised bulwarks . . .
(iii)
Black one, incubus?
she appeared
riding anguish as Tartars ride mares
over the stubble of bad years.
(iii)
Oh, in your torn stockings, with unwaved hair,
you were trudging after your anguish
over the bare fields, soberly, soberly.
(v)
But it is when she encounters the fact of herself in Olga, Olga in herself,
that the poem (which was written over a four-month period, from May to August
1964) draws together.
As through a wood, shadows and light between birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly
your life winds in me.
(v)
The final sequence of the poem focuses upon Olga’s eyes, "the brown gold
of pebbles underwater."
. . . Even when we were estranged
and my own eyes smarted in pain and anger at the thought of you.
And by other streams in other countries; anywhere where the light
reaches down through shallows to gold gravel. Olga’s
brown eyes.
She thinks of the fear in Olga’s eyes, wonders how through it all
"compassion’s candle" kept alight in those eyes. The river that has
become in the poem a symbol of the forces of time and history against which Olga
had fought, in vain, or so it had always seemed to Denise ("to change, / to
change the course of the river!") is now recognized as a part of the poet’s
life, too; and she wishes that she had understood more fully Olga’s whiteness as
well as her blackness ("Black one, black one, / there was a white / candle
in your heart" [ii]).
I cross
so many brooks in the world, there is so much light
dancing on so many stones, so many questions my eyes
smart to ask of your eyes, gold brown eyes,
the lashes short but the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining, unknowable
gaze . . .
(vi)
The poem’s message to herself is clear: you can’t only watch; you can’t only
remember; you must allow yourself to participate, to be touched.
from Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women, A New
Tradition. New York: Octagon Books, 1976. Copyright ? 1976.
Robin Riley Fast
Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, while they
might be considered opposites in some respects, share an appreciation of the sensuous, a
recognition of the political nature of individual experience and of poetry, and the fact
that each has written of her relationship with her sister, exploring movingly both the
personal and the political importance of the relationship.
Levertov writes of the sister bond in a formal
sequence; Rich, in poems that have appeared in several books over a period of years. Each
examines a complex and changing bond, colored with rivalry and intimacy, loss and
reaffirmation, shaped by forces inside each sister and outside both. They deal with
similar dilemmas: each must recognize both her likeness to and difference from her sister.
For each, the recognition of similarity and difference complicates a common double image,
that of the sister as a mirror, or as "what I might have been."
Having confronted the difficulties of sisterhood,
they suggest ways of moving toward relationships that may be both personally and
politically sustaining. Understanding her sister and their relationship allows each poet
to understand herself and to grow poetically and politically: Levertov becomes a more
politically assertive writer, and Rich establishes a concrete bridge to relationships with
other women. For both, then their poems about their sisters contribute to the development
of their poetry. And the fact that, in spite of their differences, Levertov’s and
Rich’s responses to this topic have much in common suggests the truth of their
findings for other sisters.
In her "Olga Poems," Denise Levertov
explores and recreates her relationship with her dead sister, Olga. The primary fact of
this relationship, as it is initially described, is distance.
By the gas-fire kneeling
to undress,
scorching luxuriously, raking
her nails over olive sides, the red
waistband ring–
(And the little sister
beady-eyed in the bed–
or drowsy, was I? My head
a camera–)
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark, nippled–
(Sorrow Dance, p. 53)
Olga, at 16, was sensuously alive; Denise was
separated from her by years and experience. The sisters’ present separation by death
seems to confirm the earlier distance. The gap persists as the second poem describes
Olga’s nagging voice and chewed nails, symptoms of her rage at the world, a rage her
younger sister did not share:
What rage
and human shame swept you
when you were nine and saw
the Ley Street houses,
grasping their meaning as slum.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 54)
Denise, at nine, teased her sister about the
slum, "admiring/architectural probity, circa/eighteen-fifty." Yet as poem ii
ends, the adult Denise recognizes the paradox and contradiction at Olga’s center:
"Black one, black one,/there was a white candle in your heart." "Paradox
and contradiction, we will find, are characteristic of the sisters’ relationship and
essential to the reconciliation that Denise achieves through these poems.
Recurrent images and motifs suggest Olga’s
powerful character and the difficulties of the relationship. Images associated with fire
indicate Olga’s passionate anger, desire, and nonconformity. After Olga has cast off
her family and disappeared, Denise dreams of her "haggard and rouged/lit by the
flare/from an eel– or cockle-stand on a slum street" (p. 56). When she lies
dying, her sister remarks that Olga’s hatreds, her "disasters bred of
love," and all history have "burned out, down/to the sick bone" (p. 57).
The color black also recurs, suggesting the anguish of this black-haired, olive-skinned
sister. Olga’s desperate fury seems compelled by a vision expressed in her
compulsively repeated "Everything flows" and in the image of "the rolling
dark oncoming river" whose course she struggles to change: "pressing on/to
manipulate lives to disaster. . .To change,/to change the course of the river!" (P.
55). The gradual transformation of these images, as the sequence develops, indicates the
transformation of Denise’s vision of Olga and their relationship.
The intensity of Denise’s feelings and of
her desire for reconciliation is evident in her tendency to repeat key words and
phrases—Olga is "Ridden, ridden," or "Black one, black
one"—and most powerfully in the poem immediately preceding the "Olga"
sequence in The Sorrow Dance, "A Lamentation" (p. 52):
Grief, have I denied thee?
Grief, I have denied thee.
That robe or tunic, black gauze
over black and silver my sister wore
to dance Sorrow, hung so long
in my closet. I never tried it on.
. . . . . . . .
Grief,
have I denied thee? Denied thee.
But her grief and desire are mixed with
uncertainty: fire burns, Olga’s efforts to stem the flow are worse than useless, and
she betrays her "blackness" when she dyes her hair blond. The younger
sister’s ambivalence is evident, too, as she vacillates between speaking to Olga and
describing her in the third person, before she finally commits herself to sustained direct