"But dread / was in her" sister, Levertov concludes, "a bloodbeat"
of fear; and "against the rolling dark oncoming river she raised bulwarks, setting
herself / . . . / to change the course of the river." Recognizing clearly now the
"rage for order" that "disordered her [sister’s] pilgrimage,"
Levertov’s poem in a sense makes some order out of Olga’s anguished life and partly
clarifies her own as well:
I had lost
all sense, almost, of
who she was, what–inside of her skin,
under her black hair
dyed blonde—
it might feel like to be, in the wax and wane of the moon,
in the life I feel as unfolding, not flowing, the pilgrim years–
The poet pictures various scenes of Olga’s immense fretful energy, and envisions the
final "burned out" hospital days and nights: "while pain and drugs /
quarreled like sisters in you." She comes, after all, not to answers, but to
questions which, being raised relentlessly, offer a recognition of the shapes of two lives
linked in their diverse ways by questing and caring. As Levertov explains, addressing her
sister, "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."
Sounding the most crucial of them, she exclaims that "I think of your eyes in that
photo, six years before I was born," remembering "the fear in them,"
wondering what became of the fear later, and "what kept / compassion’s candle alight
in you" through many difficult years.
The question of how to keep compassion’s candle alight in the face of numbing horror
and frustration is not simply one of hindsight or family discovery. It is one of the most
perplexing questions that faced Levertov in the coming years, as her commitments were
fired and tried by her growing awareness of what one nation can justify doing to another
in the name of abstract words and public postures. To
an extent, she found her answer in her early political poetry by looking to her own
strengths as a poet and affirming the human capacity for creative imagining and
communication. These were qualities to both counterbalance and reveal the powerful
capacities of humankind for manipulations and destruction.
From Understanding Denise Levertov. University of South Carolina Press, 1988.
Copyright ? 1988 by the University of South Carolina Press.
Audrey T. Rodgers
The Sorrow Dance was dedicated to the memory of Olga Levertoff, the poet’s
sister, who died in 1964, and the "Olga Poems" are important not only because of
their intrinsic value as fine elegiac poetry, but because of the way in which they explain
and mirror Levertov’s ever-increasing social conscience. In an interview in 1971, the
poet spoke about the importance of structure: ". . . in other works of art which I
value I often see echoes and correspondences. . . . It’s the impulse to create
pattern or to reveal pattern. I say ‘reveal,’ because I have a thing about
finding form rather than imposing it. I want to find correspondences and relationships
which are there but hidden, and I think one of the things the artist does is reveal."
It is those echoes and correspondences that hold special interest for us. It would
therefore be simplistic to view the Olga poems, as one critic has, as Levertov’s
absorption with the theme of death. While the poems are nostalgic and often
lyrical—for unredeemable time, for the "older sister" clearly a
"presence" in the life of the younger child—they are more than this. The
poems are also a "portrait," an observation that "everything flows," a
painful recapitulation of Olga’s death (at wh