On The "Olga Poems" Essay, Research Paper
Denise Levertov
Andre: Prior to the sixties you suppressed the direct autobiographical
allusions. But now you seem to be pulling in more actual facts. Would you say again this
is related to movements in poetry, such as confessional poetry?
Levertov: I’m rather antagonistic on the whole to what is called
confessional poetry which seems to exploit the private life. I’ve even felt that some
young poets, students, feel that they have to make a suicide attempt, that they must spend
some time in a mental hospital in order to be poets at all. I think that’s rather a bad
idea. I feel at this point in my life–I’m forty-seven, and I’ve been writing since I was
five years old, and publishing since I was about 20–that I have maybe earned the right to
write more personal poems if I feel like it. I’m often bored and impatient with poems by
young poets who, before learning how to relate to language, to make a poem that has
structure, has music, has some kind of autonomy, launch out into confessional poems. It
seems to me something that you earn by a long apprenticeship. I think the first poem in
which I was largely autobiographical was in a group called "The Olga Poems"
about my sister and that will be re-printed in my new book. It seems to be a prelude to
some of the later stuff and I want to get it all into one book. I’ve written an
"Introduction" for that book:
The justification then of including in a new volume poems which are available in other
collections is aesthetic. It assimilates separated parts of a whole. And I’m given courage
to do so by the hope that whole will be seen as having some value not as mere confessional
autobiography but as a document of some historical value, a record of one person’s inner
and outer experience in America during the sixties and the beginnings of the seventies, an
experience which is shared by so many and which transcends the peculiar details of each
life, though it can only be expressed through those details.
From Conversations with Denise Levertov. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi. Copyright ? 1988 by The University Press of Mississippi.
Linda Wagner-Martin
It is a commonplace of contemporary criticism that modern poetic techniques are
inadequate to sustain a long poem. What modem epics exist–Pound’s Cantos,
Williams’ Paterson, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Charles
Olson’s Maximus–have all been censured because of their "formlessness,"
their unevenness, or–at times–their sporadic applications of technique. The question is,
then, can modern poets write long poems? In Levertov’s case, there is no epic as yet to
judge. There is, however, the group of "Olga Poems," some two hundred lines of a
single theme sequence written in memory of her sister, Olga Tatjana Levertoff, who died in
1964, aged forty-nine. It is Levertov’s longest poem–at this time, one of her most
recent–and it is interesting as an illustration of her means of sustaining a single
subject.
Poem I, a succinct introductory song, is comprised of four short-line paragraphs in
which the poet’s older sister Olga lives in the poet’s memory. Details accumulate as the
poem progresses. the fire burns, the girl undresses, her skin is olive. The poet, then a
child, watches from her bed, "My head/a camera." The poem concludes with a vivid
contrast between the completeness of the young girl’s body, and the fragmentation of that
same body in death:
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled–
who now these two months long
is bones and tatters of flesh in earth.
Poem II, more formal in its structure of short tercets, presents Olga’s character more
intensely–and that of the poet as well, in contrast. Although Levertov still uses much
concrete detail ("the skin around the nails/nibbled sore"), it is detail
integral to the type of personality described here–Olga at nine already filled with
"rage/and human shame" at all injustice, herself often dealing unjustly with
others in order to correct the initial wrong. The last stanza of this poem declares the
recurrent theme, while reinforcing the image of the physically dark sister and that of the
light already introduced in the fire passage:
there was a white
candle in your heart.
These preface poems are short and concise, the first written in paragraph format
relying on visual presentation; the second, arranged in tercets and oriented toward Olga’s
character. Pace changes dramatically in Poem III. Itself a sequence of three longer
segments, Poem III moves rapidly but gently. The long phrases are valid for two reasons:
the poet is here speaking much more freely, with reminiscence woven into her direct
commentary. Also, the interweaving motif of this sequence is "Everything flows,"
a line from the hymn, "Time/like an ever-rolling stream/bears all its sons
away." The motion of this theme, of the actual words in it, demands a longer, more
ostensibly accented line.
Part I of this sequence introduces the hymn concept, as the poet remembers its use in
her earlier life. The second section shows Olga’s dread of this concept of flow, of death.
Some of her terror is reflected in the more restrained line arrangement here; although
still long, lines now fall into tercets:
But dream
was in her, a bloodbeat, it was against the rolling dark
oncoming river she raised bulwarks, setting herself
to sift cinders after daily early Mass all of one winter, . . .
To change,
to change the course of the river! What rage for order
disordered her pilgrimage–so that for years at a time
she would hide among strangers, waiting
to rearrange all mysteries in a new light.
The tercets continue in Part III, but lines are here short, helping to reflect a new
intensity as the poet pictures her sister "riding anguish . . . over the stubble of
bad years," "haggard and rouged," "her black hair/dyed blonde."
The two concluding lines of this segment return somewhat ironically to the longer rhythms
of earlier parts of this poem, and to the "Everything flows" theme. Now,
however, it is said that Olga’s life was "unfolding, not flowing." It appears,
then, that the contrast between the grandeur suggested in the hymn and Olga’s actual
life–and death–is central to the poet’s feeling as expressed through the poem.
Poem IV is another restrained poem before the rising rhythms of the concluding poems, V
and VI, The short-line quatrains describe Olga’s hospital life, hours of love and hate,
pain and drugs quarreling "like sisters in you." In this poem return the images
of the "kind candle" and the purifying flame, "all history/ burned out,
down/to the sick bone, save for/that kind candle."
Poem V, another sequence, moves again more slowly. Part 1, in couplets, is dominated by
images of gliding, winding, flowing–the poem thus is tied thematically and rhythmically
with Poem III. These steady images, however, describe the poet’s life as it was
when both girls were young. There is momentary repose in this segment with its closing
refrain, "In youth/is pleasure"; but the second poem returns to the painful life
of an older Olga, buffeted by coldness "the year you were most alone."
Levertov achieves a vivid picture of Olga’s desolation through images of frost and
cold, loneliness, neglect, but perhaps even more effectively through the rhythms of this
poem. Lines still are long, but they move more slowly because of monosyllabic words and
word combinations difficult to articulate. The alliterative opening sets the pace for the
poem:
Under autumn clouds, under white
wideness of winter skies you went walking
the year you were most alone
Such lines as "frowning as you ground out your thoughts," "the stage
lights had gone out," "How many books you read" lead to the closing tercet,
which again depicts Olga as walking, but more than that: "trudging after your
anguish/over the bare fields, soberly, soberly."
With a reference to "tearless Niobe," Levertov introduces the theme for the
strongest poem in the group, the sixth. Light in various contexts (firelight, the light of
memory, the candle) has been a central image throughout the poem–especially in contrast
with the "black" elements, Olga herself and death. Levertov has used much visual
detail, so that seeing has been important to the reader in the course of the poem, Now the
eye itself is added to the accumulative image–and Olga’s golden, fearful, mystery-filled
eyes dominate Poem VI. Her eyes are the color of pebbles under shallow water, the water
that flows throughout the poem. And in a very real sense her eyes are–for the fear of the
moving water (representative, I assume, of the inherent flow from life to death) has
colored Olga’s life. Perhaps her eyes have always looked through this distorting mist. The
remarkable thing about Olga’s eyes, however, as the image pattern makes clear, is that
they did remain alive, lit by "compassion’s candle," even through their fear.
Levertov turns to the rhythms of blank verse in this most majestic part of the total
poem. Poem VI is a continuation of the tone and movement established in the fifth,
particularly in the second part, but the structure of the sixth poem is marked with an
important difference–it is tightly connected through an interplay of the sounds which
have been used at intervals throughout the poem–l’s, s’s, o’s–sounds
which in themselves create a slow full nostalgia. The final stanza of Poem VI incorporates
these sounds, as well as the images and themes which have pervaded the earlier poems. The
viewpoint reverts to that of the poet, but the tribute to Olga is clear:
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 . . .
It is interesting that Levertov has included in this poem what recently appears to be
one of her major poetic themes–the acceptance of change (even the last great change) as
necessary to life. Olga’s tragedy was an inability to accept that change. Her "rage
for order" made her inflexible, even though "compassion’s candle" burned
through that inflexibility. This central theme was well expressed affirmatively five years
earlier in "A Ring of Changes," the longest poem Levertov had written at that
time. This poem is interesting technically as well as thematically. She uses a six-part
arrangement, the first four short poems serving as prefaces. All four are in free
paragraph form. The fifth poem is much longer; still in free form, it has longer lines.
This central poem contains many symbols–the treevine of life, Casals’ cello, a writer’s
worktable, light. It is a good poem, despite more didactic statement than in most of
Levertov’s poetry.
Yet "A Ring of Changes" as a whole is comparatively weak, I think, because it
has no technical rationale. All the poems are separate, with few interrelating images
or–perhaps more important to the poet–rhythms. Each poem is written in the same form;
consequently, there seems to be little reason to divide the parts. The technical contrast
between this poem and the Olga sequence is great.
The most critical reader cannot question the unity, the single effect, of the
"Olga Poems"; yet Levertov’s patterns of organization and rhythms differ widely
within the poem. It is from her masterful use of contrast and balance that the harmony of
the sequence comes–Poem IV, for example, slowing the movement, bringing the
"everything flows" theme back to rest before it sets off again with new impetus.
It should be of interest to those critics who question the modern poets’ technical
proficiency that the techniques used throughout this long poem are the same devices
Levertov uses in her short poems–the single-theme lyric, the sequence, the madrigal–each
with its own appropriate line length and stanza arrangement. One fruit of her poetic
experience is surely the unity of the "Olga Poems."
[. . . .]
Worksheets as Illustration of Practices, "Olga
Poems"
Criticism by its very nature tends to establish arbitrary standards for judging poetry.
Sometimes in speaking of organization, of prosody, of theme, the reader forgets that these
segments are not separate from the poem as a whole–except as a convenience in the process
of analysis. The poet does not think first of structure, then of words; he conceives of
the poem as an entity. Perhaps in revision he considers separate elements in that, for
example, he may change a word to strengthen rhythm. But writing poetry is seldom the
orderly application of theories to practice that most critical discussions unfortunately
suggest.
At issue here, I think, is the definition of the poetic process itself, a process which
has been explored and described for centuries. That its mysteries have never been
unraveled is, perhaps, a tribute to the innate power of the human spirit. For it seems to
be agreed by nearly all poets, Levertov among them, that the poem begins somewhere in a
non-intellectual response and is brought to perfection, finally, through a surveillance
which is at least partly intellectual. As Levertov writes of Wallace Stevens’ mot:
"’Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.’ Almost."
Lest the poem sound entirely like a gift from a willfully evanescent muse, let
me quote from her description of finding the impetus for poetry:
I have always disliked the idea of any kind of deliberate
stimulation of creativity (from parlor games to drugs)–believing that if you have nothing
you really feel, really must say, then keep your mouth shut; and I still believe that–but
with a difference: Namely, that since I also believe that whatever in our experience we
truly give our attention to will yield something of value, I have come to see that the apparently
arbitrary focussing of that attention may also be a way in to our underground
rivers of feeling and understanding, to revelations of truth.
Supervielle: "How often we think we have nothing to say when a
poem is waiting in us, behind a thin curtain of mist, and it is enough to silence the
noise around us for that poem to be unveiled."
Rilke: "If a thing is to speak to you, you must for a certain time
regard it as the only thing that exists, the unique phenomenon that your diligent and
exclusive love has placed at the center of the universe, something the angels serve that
very day on that matchless spot."
I think what validates a practice or device, which may otherwise only
stimulate worthless, superficial, cynical work, is the writer’s attitude when he uses it.
If he works with "Kavonah" (care, awe, reverence, love–the "diligent
love" Rilke speaks of) he can release the spark hidden in the dust."
Levertov emphasizes that the poet must attend the poem, must "stay with the
prima materia of a poem patiently but with intense alertness. As a result the
language becomes active where in earlier stages it was sluggish. However, let me add that
there are times when it is as important to know enough to keep one’s hands off a poem–off
a first draft that is right just the way it came–as to revise. Some ‘given’ poems arrive
without any previous work (of course, unconscious psychic work has undoubtedly preceded
them )." The writer "has to look at the poem after he’s written the first draft
and consider with his knowledge, with his experience and craftsmanship, what needs doing
to this poem. . . . It’s a matter of a synthesis of instincts and intelligence."
Since one of the paradoxes of art is the fact that some poems are "given"
entire while others require more or less revision, this chapter consists largely of
comparative excerpts from Levertov’s worksheets. Through the example of the poet’s own
practice, I hope to identify her more common patterns in revision and, consequently, to
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–
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
address, which carries her into a closer bond with Olga.
The sisters’ estrangement seems to have
several sources, which vary in importance over time. The poet repeatedly draws attention
to the nine years’ difference in their ages by referring to herself as "little
sister," sitting in her "Littlest Bear’s" armchair or riding her bike.
The younger girl apparently resisted growing up and probably resented Olga’s womanly
body. But more than age separates them; their views of life are radically different. Olga
seems to see life and history as relentlessly surging onward, carrying everything
implacably toward disaster: "everything flows." Her dominant impulse appears to
be resistance. And her resistance takes the form of rage that "burns" but
doesn’t accomplish the change she desires, rage equivalent perhaps to that of Sylvia
Plath, or to the "bomb" whose power Emily Dickinson managed only with great
effort and skill to control. Bent on changing the world, Olga attempts to control her
sister, who becomes one of the "human puppets. . . stung into alien semblances by the
lash of her will" (p. 54). Her passion makes her overbearing, manipulative, and
demanding—not the easiest person to love.
Denise, on the other hand, "feels" life
as "unfolding, not flowing" (p. 56). Unlike the overwhelming
river-like"flow" against which Olga struggles, "unfolding" suggests
the opening of a plant—that is, life, and the power of individual life. It implies
the quiet process of gradual growth and assurance about the continuity and the essential
goodness of life. "Unfolding" is thus, at least in this context, more consistent
with the organicism that moves most of Levertov’s poetry. Her different view of life
gives Denise a different mode of action and thought. She is careful, quiet, controlled.
Early in her assessment of Olga and their relationship, this habit sometimes makes for
cool, unsympathetic distance, as evidenced in her nine-year-old response to the slums.
However, this quiet mode helps her gradually to reconnect with Olga, for it enables her to
balance and examine multiple layers of experience in long, complex lines that move surely,
if not rapidly, to the final, affirming image of Olga.
Beneath the (at first apparently
absolute)estrangement, the pet reveals an impulse to reach out to her sister, to
understand, and recover the bonds between them. It is an impulse based in implicit
acknowledgment of shared experience and love. Her desire for connection is most evident
when she evokes moments of intimacy, often rediscovered beneath the surfaces of the same
words, events, or scenes that estrange the sisters, indicating that their bond preceded,
and must finally bridge, the distance between them. Thus, Denise twice recalls Olga’s
loneliness, only to be reminded of their deep bond.
. . .you went walking
the year you were most alone.
. . . . . . . .
crossing the ploughlands (whose color I named murple,
a shade between mauve and brown that we loved
when I was a child and you
not much more than a child)
. . . . . . . .
How many books
you read in your silent lodgings that winter,
how the plovers transpierced your solitude out of doors with
their strange cries
I had flung my arms to in longing, once by your side
stumbling over the furrows–
(Sorrow Dance, pp. 58-59)
Recalling what they have shared, the poet first
emphasizes the similarity, not the difference, in their ages, and then, as she sees
herself flinging open her arms in longing, acknowledges a passionate desire akin to
Olga’s. Such glimpses of similarity contribute importantly to Denise’s new
understanding of Olga and to the reconciliation it makes possible.
The change in the poet’s view of Olga is
apparent in change sin her imagery. The flames of Olga’s passion fade, as the poet
comes to see clearly "that kind candle" in her sister’s heart; recognizing
that love was the source of Olga’s rage, Denise now wonders, with some awe,
"what kept compassion’s candle alight in you. . .?" (P. 60). Similarly, the
image of relentlessly flowing water becomes first "a sea/of love and pain," (p.
57) and finally the streams and brooks through which Denise sees Olga’s eyes and
fully recognizes her sister.
New motifs also reflect and contribute to
Denise’s changing view of Olga. The most important of these is music. Gradually, we
come to see Olga as a musician and lover of music. In the final poem, Denise recalls her
sister "savagely" playing "straight through all the Beethoven
sonatas," and realizes that Olga was playing to survive: "you were enduring in
the/falls and rapids of the music, the arpeggios range out, the rectory/trembled, our
parents seemed effaced" (p. 59-60). The poet is able to recognize the importance of
music to Olga here because she has earlier recalled a serener music which stills binds her
to Olga:
In a garden grene [sic] whenas I lay–
You set the words to a tune so plaintive
it plucks its way through my life as through a wood.
As through a wood, shadow and light between
birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly
your life winds in me.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 57)
The memory of this music leads directly to an
extended memory of shared childhood longings and secrets, in which the age difference
again dissolves; Olga’s song twines through this memory, too: she had imagines that
the sisters might lift a trapdoor in the ground and travel to "another country,"
where we would like without father or mother
and without longing for the upper world. The birds
sang sweet, O song, in the midst of the daye,
. . . . . . . .
and we entered silent mid-Essex churches on hot afternoons
and communed with the effigies of knights and their ladies
and their slender dogs asleep at their feet,
the stone so cold—
In youth
is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 58)
The sisters dream of freedom from adults, and of
romance. Olga, too–it is her story, we’re told–may have yearned to stay a
child. Yet Olga’s suffering, in childhood as later, runs as an undercurrent even of
this most peaceful poem. Music, recollected, then, restores and enlarges the intimacy of
which it was earlier an integral part.
Gradually, the poet’s view of Olga changes.
She recognizes Olga’s suffering more fully as she sees her sister as a child, both in
the dreamy passage just quoted, and in the painful passage that precedes her final vision:
"I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born,/fear in them. What
did you do with your fear,/later?" (P. 60). Acknowledging Olga’s childhood,
Denise herself matures. Recalling Olga’s music, she finds another source of kinship
in art. Recognizing this bond between them, recreating Olga, and through her sister’s
influence eventually expanding the possibilities of her own poetry, Levertov the poet
indeed acts like Olga, the storyteller who attempted to recreate the world.
Levertov’s new understanding and sense of
kinship with Olga are confirmed in the final lines of the sequence. She recalls the past,
when her eyes "smarted in pain and anger" at the thought of Olga; at the end,
she says, "so many questions my eyes/smart to ask your eyes." (Pp. 59-60).
Finally, she returns to the imagery of the first poem, re-evoking Olga’s warm
sensuous darkness:
. . .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. . .(Levertov’s ellipsis)
(Sorrow Dance, p. 60)
By now the vision has gained the depth and
intimacy of adult understanding and love, which allow the speaker to acknowledge her own
limits, and her sister’s integrity, and to accept the fact that some questions will
never be answered.
Coming to terms with Olga, accepting and loving
her, is important to the poet in several ways. That this relationship was long weighted
with misunderstand and pain is evident in Levertov’s earlier, less direct, references
to it. In "Relative Figures Reappear" and "A May of the Western Part of the
County of Essex in England, she refers to Olga as frightening but dear. Two other poems,
"Song for a Dark Voice" and "A Window," evoke Olga’s spirit
through imagery similar to that of the "Olga Poems" and surround that spirit
with a mysterious attraction.
Another dimension of Olga’s importance,
transcending personal emotion (but growing from it), is evident in the place this sequence
takes in the center of The Sorrow Dance, where it links poems of Eros, which explore
sensuous experience, first to poems that emphasize vision, elaborating on the new capacity
for understanding achieved through reconciliation with Olga, and then, most significantly,
to poems of ardent political commitment. Levertov is known today for her commitment to the
anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. I believe that she owes the conviction that makes her
political beliefs integral to much of her writing to Olga and to her own effort to
understand the importance of her sister and their relationship. Before The Sorrow Dance,
her poetry does not generally reflect her political interests. That Olga has freed her to
speak out is clearly suggested in poems that follow the "Olga Poems." In "A
Note to Olga (1966), "the poet detects her sister’s presence at a protest march:
"Your high soprano/sings out from just/in back of me–." It seems to be Olga
who is lifted "limp and ardent" into the gaping paddywagon (Sorrow Dance, pp.
88-89). We can also see Olga’s influence in later books, most notably To Stay Alive,
and The Freeing of the Dust. Her influence is present both in Levertov’s political
topics and in her ability to sympathize with radical protesters, some of whom are surely
much more like Olga than like the poet herself.
Olga’s life is vindicated and honored in her
sister’s poems. Her passionate commitment to change contributes to Levertov’s
maturity and her poetic development. Olga’s pain, shared by Denise, gives depth to
the latter’s vision. Levertov acknowledges her debt by concluding The Sorrow Dance
with "The Ballad of My Father," a poem written by Olga shortly before her death.
Allowing Olga thus to speak for herself, she shares her book with her sister and confirms
the link between them.
But while Denise acknowledges that she has grown
through her new understanding of Olga, herself, and their relationship, important
differences remain, and Denise’s view of life is validated. Olga’s led her to
grief and death. Denise’s view, on the other hand, is echoed in the structure and
process of the "Olga" sequence itself. Instead of "flowing"
relentlessly, the poems, and with them the poet’s view of Olga, unfold. The movements
backward in time to a more intimate past, and even to the image of Olga’s frightened
face, can be thought of as the folding back of layers to reveal the essential core of
Olga’s character and the sisters’ bond. Levertov also insists on the differences
between them in the political poems of To Stay Alive: Olga has freed the poet to a fuller
knowledge of Eros, but her fuller understanding means she must diverge form Olga’s
path, as she does when she turns away from consuming anger to affirm the value of
struggling for life.
The final words of the "Olga Poems,"
then, are true both to Denise’s love for her sister and to her recognition that Olga
will always be inaccessible to her: that "unknowable gaze" is beautiful but
impenetrable. Levertov thus acknowledges the tension of the sisters’ bond, the
contrast between intimacy and estrangement, which is one of Adrienne Rich’s dominant
themes when she explores the same subject.
Ed. By A.H. McNaron The Sister Bond, A
Feminist View of a Timeless Connection. Copyright ? 1985 by Pergamon Press Inc. New
York. pp. 107-113.
Harry Marten
That the roots of responsibility to community run deep in the poet’s personal
experience, entwining private and public feelings, is evident in the moving "Olga
Poems" that Levertov writes in memorial to her much older sister Olga Levertoff, who
died at the age of fifty. Recalling the childhoods they spent together but never quite
shared because of differences in age and temperament, the poet recreates and speculates
upon the impulses, desires, anxieties, and beliefs of the complex person "who now
these two months long / is bones and tatters of flesh in earth." What "the
little sister" rejected or was intuitively moved by, but couldn’t possibly
understand, the adult poet now knows and recognizes as an important seedbed of her own
understanding. Levertov remembers the ways Olga "muttered into my childhood,"
sounding her "rage / and human shame" before poverty, her insistence on the
worth of change, her love of the musical words of hymns. She recognizes, too, what may be
some of the cost of such sensitivity, energy and commitment: "the years of
humiliation, / of paranoia . . . and near-starvation, losing / the love of those you
loved." Levertov ponders and pays homage to "compassion’s candle alight"
nonetheless in her sister.
The sequence begins vividly with a sensory recreation of a child’s vision, suggesting
in its intensity how important the older sister was to the younger, and yet how separate
and impenetrable she was. The reader can virtually feel the heat "By the
gas-fire" as Olga kneels "to undress"
scorching luxuriously, raking
her nails over olive sides, the red
waistband ring—
……………… I…………
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled . . .
The reader recognizes, too, how absorbed and apart the poet-child is, taking it all in
for a lifetime’s reference:
(And the little sister
beady-eyed in the bed—
or drowsy, was I? My head
a camera–) …
But the adult poet is less concerned here with the physical moment than with
comprehending the emotional tension and energy that shaped her sister and thereby affected
her own life. Quickly attention shifts from a camera view of frozen time to moments of
meditation and speculation, as Levertov, blending the child’s point of view and the
remembering adult’s more reasoned understanding, relates the physical to the emotional.
Signs of stress predominate in the portrait of a young woman who seems at once
forbiddingly old and vulnerably adolescent. They appear in "The high pitch of /
nagging insistence" of Olga’s voice; in the "lines / creased into raised
brows"; and in "the skin around the nails / nibbled sore." The teenager who
"wanted / to shout the world to its senses" who knew from the age of nine what
defined a "slum" was teased by her small sister reaching the same age,
"admiring / architectural probity, circa / eighteen-fifty." But the poet, grown
up and mixing memory with her own clear and strong adult social conscience, recognizes
that in her dark browed and mercurial sibling was a purity of caring difficult to live
with, but crucially valuable in its steady brightness: "Black one, black one, / there
was a white / candle in your heart."
Pondering the steps and missteps of Olga’s life in relation to her own values and
choices, Levertov conjures a vision of her sister’s restlessness turned fearfully against
itself. Half remembering and half creating moments of the past, Levertov recalls Olga’s
conviction that "everything flows," expressed as nervous mutterings while she
was "pacing the trampled grass" of childhood playgrounds. These were words, the
poet acknowledges, that "felt … alien" to the much quieter small child
"look[ing] up from [her] Littlest Bear’s cane armchair." Yet they were a source
of comfort and bonding as well:
… linked to words we loved
from the hymnbook—Time
like an ever-rolling stream / bears all its sons away–
"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