Texto Voluntario Arrobatico

Moistening Our Roots with Music: Creative Power in Denise Levertov's "A Tree Telling of
Orpheus"
Author(s): Marilyn Kallet
Source: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 38, No. 3, Denise Levertov Issue (Autumn,
1992), pp. 305-323
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441524
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Moistening Our Roots with Music:
Creative Power in Denise Levertov's
"A Tree Telling of Orpheus"
MARILYN KALLET
The sources of power in Denise Levertov's poem "A Tree Telling

of Orpheus" are both ancient and contemporary, obvious and occul
Embodying myth and myth-making, the poem enacts its own genesis.
Its rhythm and images continually remind us of beginnings: of th
world, of language, and of poetry's birth from dance. Creation myths
according to Jungian scholar Marie-Louise Von Franz, have always had
a stronger resonance than other mythic patterns: "Of a different class
from other myths. . . they convey a mood which implies that what is
said will concern the basic things of existence, something more than i
contained in other myths.... Creation myths are the deepest and most
important of all myths" (5). The telling of creation myths in man
traditional societies forms a vital part of teaching the initiatory rituals
Such telling reenacts Creation, allowing the participants to experience
renewal. In Levertov's poem, as in oral tradition poetry, language
active, effecting a sense of loss and renewal in the participant/reader. A
the title promises, this is an Orphic hymn, sung by an initiate, one who
celebrates Orpheus's gentle and powerful songs, who retells the Orphic
story of death and rebirth. The mythic pattern of going underground
being buried like Persephone, being torn to pieces like the ancient cor
god, and being remembered in ritual and song-this pattern is the vital
nervous and circulatory system of the poem.
To revitalize an ancient myth is no small task. It would be
impossible to narrate Orpheus's journey in a short poem, much less to
evoke his famed music, or the spirit of his quest. But underlying and
305
TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE
propelling the narrative, the sustained rhythm of Levertov's

permits a bodily and imaginative sense of loss and restorat
supple lines and precise rhythms, the poem approximates dan
to be read out loud, and read as scored. In doing so, one has th
of inhabiting one's voice and body. There are few poems in
contemporary literature which evoke this strong sense of physical and
imaginative life on the move and in harmony. Among these are Charles
Olson's "For Sappho, Back," and passages from his "As the Dead Prey
Upon Us," as well as George Quasha's "Rilke's Third Elegy,
Transposed," Robert Duncan's "Variations on Two Dicta of William
Blake," and William Carlos Williams's "Rain." It is no coincidence that
Olson and Rilke/Quasha also sing of death, dismemberment or tearing
up of roots, and rebirth. This shamanic, initiatory theme has a hold on
us, challenging our poets to bring to bear their most skilled use of
rhythm.
Levertov's sources for poetry are contemporary as well as
traditional and mythic. In the 1960s her work was strongly influenced
by the theory and practice of projective verse as well as by the work of
other innovative contemporary poets. Robert Duncan, who believed in
poetry's magical qualities, and who had the most subtle ear for rhythm
of any contemporary American poet, had a profound impact on
Levertov's work. In addition, in her own writing on theory she quotes
and assimilates Charles Olson's writings on projective verse. Some of
Olson's ideas are particularly helpful in considering "A Tree Telling of
Orpheus." According to Olson, the contemporary poet works in the
"open field," listening for the form that is appropriate to each poem,
rather than paying homage to inherited forms. The blank page is a
charged field, a source of energy, for the poet who knows how to bring
out its rhythmical life, to find the right "musical phrase" (Ezra Pound's
term). "Kinetics," dynamism, the poem as "energy-discharge"-Olson's
terms place emphasis on rhythm as the primary source of a poem's
creative life. Along with Olson's theories, Levertov includes Gerard
Manley Hopkins's "sprung rhythm" and "inscape" as having influenced
her thinking about the dynamic quality and the sense of wholeness she
expects from poetry. In harmony with sound and image, the rhythmical
structure of each poem will tell its deepest story, inventing itself
formally as the story unfolds. Robert Creeley's principle that "FORM IS
NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT," says
Olson, gives the poem its life (Selected 16).
Re-visioning Creeley and Olson, Levertov goes one step further by
insisting on the magical quality of verse: "Form is never more than a
306
"A TREE TELLING OF ORPHEUS"
revelation of content" (PW 13). Like Duncan, Levertov bel

innate and perfect form waiting to be embodied in the
than on magic, Olson had focused on the sophisticated
listening for the poem, involving:
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE
and on sleekness and movement (Selected 19). There must

waste of energy-on the contrary, "ONE PERCEPTION MUST
IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO ANOTHER." Levertov
tones down Olson's line by presenting it in lower-case lette
refers to it as "the law" (PW 13). Olson's pronounceme
describe Levertov's accomplishment in "A Tree Telling o
like a mythic animal, the poem leaps into its dynamic and p
constantly on the move in the reader's imagination.
This sense of the poem as a living whole, with perfe
musical language, conveys Levertov's own belief in "orga
Levertov expands on Hopkins's terms "inscape" and "
explain her own views on intrinsic form and on the poet's
the sensory, intellectual, and emotional process of perceivi
(PW 7). By a deep and careful listening for the "pulse"
"horizon" of the poem, the poet intuits the form of her poe
(PW 12). In her theory and in her great long poem, Leverto
Olson's vigorous idea and his belief in the syllable as "k
Duncan's clairvoyant listening and belief in magic. The p
distinctly Levertov's, resonating beyond theories in its myt
Levertov's journey to this sustained poem called for
risk, and discipline. As a young writer she left England for
be in the place where creating a new poetics was po
apprenticed herself to William Carlos Williams, visited w
corresponded with him as his health permitted from 19
death in 1963. In his touching and inspiring letters William
toward strict discipline: "Practice, practice practice! must be
of the artist. You have to write ... practically in your sleep
of bed day or night when the inevitable word comes to you
may never come again." ("Letters" 167). Williams encou
write even without inspiration: "At times there's nothi
finger exercises. Maybe that's the end. For what dreadfu
Nothing may happen, I hope it never does-but if it doe
chance of doing some arresting writing, something that
307
really waiting for with open arms, is to be ready" ("Letters" 1

ominous tone of Williams's letter resulted from his own strug
illness, and with his fear of losing his wife Flossie's love, as we
political oppression: the communist "witch hunts" of the 1
targeted him, and Life magazine continued to glorify the testin
hydrogen bomb with spectacular photographs. In Levertov'
anti-Vietnam war poetry, with its language of "life thatlwants t
92), we find a fulfillment of Williams's intuition that Leverto
have a responsibility to deal with the serious crises of their ti
strong feeling evoked in "A Tree Telling of Orpheus" may also
as a crisis of being. The poem itself is the dramatization of
crisis as well as its temporary resolution. A love poem, and
about the Muse, it tells us what the poet did while she was "wai
the Muse to come back. She learned to dance in a graceful,
measure that far outstripped anything Williams had pred
women poets ("Women can rarely do it" ["Letters" 165]).
Levertov's poem, as reproduced here, is widely availab

1970 volume Relearning the Alphabet. However, her score i
follow on a large page - as in Stony Brook 1/2, where it first a
where clusters of words against a blank field transmit a p
language interacting with silence. There we can more readily p
the "open field" as well as the "winding figures the lyre'
designed."
308
A Tree Telling of Orpheus
White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began

I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer-and then
my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips
were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only
deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew

out on the pasture slope, beyond the forest.
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless
twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
He carried a burden made of
some cut branch bent while it was green,
strands of a vine tight-stretched across it. From this,
when he touched it, and from his voice
which unlike the wind's voice had no need of our
leaves and branches to complete its sound,
came the ripple.
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
309
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.
He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:

the bark thrilled like a leaf still-folded.
Music! There was no twvig of me not
trembling with joy and fear.
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and language
came into my roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
He told of journeys,
of where sun and moon go while we stand in dark,
of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day
deeper than roots ...
He told of the dreams of man, wars, passions, griefs,
and I, a tree, understood words-ah, it seemed
my thick bark would split like a sapling's that
grew too fast in the spring
when a late frost wounds it.
Fire he sang,
that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name)
were both frost and fire, its chords flamed
up to the crown of me.
310
I was seed again.
I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
And at the heart of my wood

(so close I was to becoming man or a god)
there was a kind of silence, a kind of sickness,
something akin to what men call boredom,
something
(the poem descended a scale, a stream over stones)
that gives to a candle a coldness
in the midst of its burning, he said.
It was then,
when in the blaze of his power that
reached me and changed me
I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
to leave me. Slowly
moved from my noon shadow
to open light,
words leaping and dancing over his shoulders
back to me
rivery sweep of lyre-tones becoming
slowly again
ripple.
And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder-
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn. In the forest
they too had heard,
311
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of
their depths.
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our
branches moving, our trunks breasting the air.
But the music!
The music reached us.
Clumsily,
stumbling over our own roots,
rustling our leaves
in answer,
we moved, we followed.
All day we followed, up hill and down.

We learned to dance,
for he would stop, where the ground was flat,
and words he said
taught us to leap and to wind in and out
around one another in figures the lyre's measure designed.
The singer
laughed till he wept to see us, he was so glad.
At sunset
we came to this place I stand in, this knoll

with its ancient grove that was bare grass then.
In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
312
we could almost
not hear it in the
moonless dark.
By dawn he was gone.
We have stood here since,
in our new life.
We have waited.
He does not return.
It is said he made his earth-jourey, and lost
what he sought.
It is said they felled him
and cut up his limbs for firewood.
And it is said
his head still sang and was swept out to sea singing.
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our furthest
leaf-tips
further.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The musicl
313
Orpheus, proto-poet, Thracian son of Kalliope, one of th

Orpheus whose name alone is an invocation, consummate musi
one who awakens things by singing and naming them, the be
one whom creatures follow, Orpheus who sings his way down
the underworld to find Eurydice and then loses her again, th
is torn apart by the Furies, whose head goes out to sea still
singing-Orpheus the hero does not sing his own story for us. His
initiate recounts for us the time when Paradise was at hand, when the
Muse was close enough to touch. If Orpheus himself did the singing,
could we bear the intensity? Humbly, like one of us, the tree begins its
story at the beginning.
"White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began ..." The poem
opens with its song of emergence from silence and nothingness. The
mood is charged with the solemnity of genesis myths. As Native
American poet Scott Momaday states the law of creation: "A word has
power in itself. It comes from nothing and gives origin to all things"
(33). Levertov's music begins gradually with this overture. Through a
series of negations, disbelief and rumor are dispelled:
When the rippling began
I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors
of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched,
unmoving.
By disclaiming literal and easy answers, the tree tells us that this story
takes place within, and does not have to do with ordinary weather.
Elsewhere Levertov has written about needing a "horizon note" or
rhythmical focal point for her poetry, and she equates "horizon" with
the underlying "pulse" of the poem (PW 12). In this sense the "treeless
horizon" is the "open field" where the poet will begin to invent her
form. Each line may be read as one beat, one measure of time elapsed,
as Williams might have counted it (Selected 326-27). This predictable but
flexible line comprises what Williams termed the "variable foot." Within
a fairly steady rhythm, Levertov varies the patterns of stresses and the
number of words and syllables per line. In this manner she can slow the
pace or quicken it, placing rhythmical and visual emphasis on certain
words.
The first line of "A Tree Telling of Orpheus" gives us the poem's
rhythmical building blocks, the primary possibilities, with two stresses
("White dawn."), one stress ("Stillness.") and three stresses, ("When the
rippling began"). The three-stress passage without punctuation opens
up the poem at the line's end, generating a rhythmical sense of
314
possibilities that underscores content. Quoting Lewis H

Hass offers these metaphors as suggestions about rhy
meanings: "Two is an exchange, three is a circle of energy,"
quotes a statement on rhythm by Leonard Bernstein: "
rhythm of the body, three is the rhythm of the mind (
Levertov's poem the two-stressed phrases steady the rhythm
thirty lines, thumping like a heartbeat: white dawn, sea-win
sh6rt trunk, gold grass, etc. This emphasis shifts to three be
as the poem enters the deepest and most stirring secti
narrative.
The two-line bridge between the first and second clusters of
imagery has been set apart spatially, indented deeply. These lines draw
our attention: "Yet I was not afraid, only/deeply alert." The shorter line
carries rhythmical weight, with its heavy stress on "deep" and its stress
on the second syllable of "alert." The stress on "deep" underscores
poetry's ability to evoke a hypnotic state. "Alert" reminds us to focus
with a clear mind on the text. Here the poet is describing her own state
of mind as she composes, her own deep listening for the emerging
patterns in the poem.
The narrative has described Orpheus's effect upon the tree. As
the "ripple drew nearer" the tree felt scorched by dry heat. We learn to
know the singer through the tree's vertical body, and from the outside
in, from the bark to the sap. The speaker's knowledge of Orpheus is
tactile and immediate: "my own outermost branches began to tingle,
almost as if/fire had been lit below them, too close, and their
twig-tips/were drying and curling." When the tree describes Orpheus
from its non-cerebral perspective, the images are pleasing, allowing the
musician/hero to come to life for us as in a fairy tale:
He was a man, it seemed: the two
moving stems, the short trunk, the two
arm-branches, flexible, each with five leafless twigs at their ends,
and the head that's crowned by brown or gold grass,
bearing a face not like the beaked face of a bird,
more like a flower's.
Personification is the poet's obvious tool for evoking creative power.

Ironically, here the tree personifies the human from its perspective,
giving us a fresh image of ourselves. Only when one stops to think how
difficult it is to accomplish personification in the twentieth century does
the poem's magic become clear. The poet becomes midwife to the poem
as she evokes in detail first the tree's body, then the echo, the man's
body. The imagery gives us another paradigm for creation by its
315
naming, its palpable evocation of the hero's body, much as oral

cultures restore the world by singing the praises of the God's
Believable personification, temporarily believable in the be
span of this long poem, conveys to us again our own life and
another creature. This ability to connect with other beings is
have lost in contemporary society. Robert Duncan, for ma
Levertov's close friend and mentor, states his convictions:
The modern mind has not only chickened out on God, on
on Creation, but it has chickened out on the common thi
our actual world, taking the properties of things as their
retracting all sense of fellow creatureliness. Not o
presences of gods and ideas are denied, becoming f
modern man "supposed" experiences, but the pres
stones, trees, animals and even men as spiritual be
exorcised in our contemporary common sense. (Truth
The exclusion of women in Duncan's list of "spiritual beings" b
our attention a certain historical lack of consciousness about issues of
gender and their connection to language. Duncan's use of the
supposedly universal "men," and Levertov's repeat of "brothers" t
refer to all the "others," the trees, remind us that poets are not isolated
from their times, though they may be forward-looking in many ways.
Levertov's images in the next cluster of words are spaced to evoke
excitement; rhythmical, sexual energy reinforces sensual imagery
Though the tree is presumably a "he," with his "sap" rising, Orpheus is
depicted as a nurturer, like Williams's wife Flossie, watering her plants
in "Asphodel." The impression is one of androgyny and wholeness:
But it was now no longer a ripple (he had come near and
stopped in my first shadow) it was a wave that bathed me
as if rain
rose from below and around me
instead of falling.
And what I felt was no longer a dry tingling:
I seemed to be singing as he sang, I seemed to know
what the lark knows; all my sap
was mounting towards the sun that by now
had risen, the mist was rising, the grass
was drying, yet my roots felt music moisten them
deep under earth.
Indeed, according to the lore about Orpheus, "his outstanding quality i
gentleness amounting at times to softness." His influence "was always o
the side of civilization and the arts of peace." He is a culture-giver,
nurturing spirit. Unlike Apollo, with whom he shares some attributes
316
Orpheus has no warrior attributes. The calm which surr

differs from the wildness of Dionysus, whose religion he per
"The power of the lyre was to soften the hearts of warriors
their thoughts to peace, just as it could tame the wildest
(Guthrie 40). In this light, Levertov's poem may be seen
anti-Vietnam poem, and the "brothers" maybe the "war
Levertov strongly wishes to calm and soothe, though the poe
any single interpretation.
In this intriguing portion of the poem, form and cont
aesthetic tension, for though the lines form a picture of des
refrain is about "sap" rising in unison with all creation. The
each other in the progressive present, falling, tingling,
mounting, rising, drying. Short three-stress phrases reinforc
of sensual "wetness" in "as if rain" and "all my sap." The
falling or descent in these lines reminds us of William Carlos
triadic lines in "Journey to Love" (in Pictures from Breughel),
Williams's lines Levertov's are not predictable. The form she
unique to this poem and can never be reused. Through th
tension this passage embodies we can feel creative life c
through the poem and through us.
In the passages that follow, line endings are an obvious
rhythmical energy; Levertov often splices a phrase to impel
forward: "Music! There was no twig of me not/trembling wi
fear." Set on the line by itself, "trembling with joy and
dramatic emphasis, again signaling to us the poet's state of m
Levertov evokes the sensual experience of receiving langu
Then as he sang
it was no longer sounds only that made the music:
he spoke, and as no tree listens I listened, and languag
came into my.roots
out of the earth,
into my bark
out of the air,
into the pores of my greenest shoots
gently as dew
and there was no word he sang but I knew its meaning.
This evocation of receiving language through the body reminds us of

Alicia Ostriker's study of contemporary women poets Stealing the
Language; their extensive use of images of the body reveals a reliance on
the body as a source of content and form for poetry. Adrienne Rich also
expresses this reliance when she speaks tenderly of a woman who "is
317
rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood/ a score touche

her perhaps by some words, a few chords ... /a tale only she ca
(74). Though Levertov's speaker addresses the "others" as "br
she shares with Rich and Ostriker a confidence in the body as a
source of knowledge and creative power.
In the next movement of the poem the tree relates Orpheus
"of an earth-journey he dreamed he would take some day/deepe
roots." The tree has become a new being through its acquis
language; now he understands every word, and will be able to r
the story. Formally there are interesting juxtapositions here. A
bearing only a faint caesura after "sapling's" conveys a quick
seemed/ my thick bark would split like a sapling's that grew to
the spring/ when a late frost wounds it." The juxtaposition of
line against shorter ones gives more time and attention to the
of the latter. Accordingly, the next line, "Fire he sang," is
stressed, with "fire" and "he sang" set up as rhythmical equivalen
connection reminds us of the phoenix, another creature of
death and renewal.
Once again the tree rehearses its own being, singing the vertica
song from the roots "up to the crown of me." The singer dreams back
in step-down lines that take him deeper into his history. He relives his
beginnings:
I was seed again.

I was fern in the swamp.
I was coal.
In this short passage, Levertov pays homage to William's triadic line, the
one he used to explore the descent myth in "Asphodel" (in Pictures from
Breughel).
Lovertov acknowledges that sometimes there are "rifts" in the
poem despite the fact that Olson coached contemporary poets to permit
no "slackness" in the lines. The next stanza contains the only "rift" in
this poem. This time the step-down lines resort to "talk" rather than to
music or enactment. The tree is "so close... to becoming man or a god"
that it loses its fresh view and fierce energy, saying: "there was a kind of
silence, a kind of sickness, something akin to what men call boredom."
Rather than denying that this "rift" exists, Levertov leaves it in the
poem as an obstacle to be overcome. As she sums up in her essay on
organic poetry, "There must be a place in the poem for rifts
too-(never to be stuffed with imported ore). Great gaps between
perception and perception which must be leapt across if they are to be
318
crossed at all. The X factor, the magic, is when we come

and make those leaps" (PW 13).
The leap to the next stanza is a leap into dizzying inte
as a leap into loss and independence. The lines become
with more space between them, more emphasis on sin
phrases:
It was then,
when in the blaze of his power that
reached me and changed me
I thought I should fall my length,
that the singer began
to leave me. Slowly
moved from my noon shadow
to open light.
Words weave back and forth across the poem, mirroring the "rivery
sweep of lyre-tones becoming/slowly again/ripple."
The most fragmented, agitated passage of the poem ensues,
rhythmically the poem goes deepest here. It is a difficult passage to
discuss, not because it is technically complicated, but because looking
closely at rhythm can be frightening. As Robert Hass states, "Because
rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize
us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power. And power is
political" (108). Rhythm reveals the unconscious, and here in the poem
the unconscious speaks from its oldest and darkest layers. The tree
sings of its loss and of being torn apart, prefiguring Orpheus's destiny:
And I
in terror
but not in doubt of
what I must do
in anguish, in haste,
wrenched from the earth root after root,
the soil heaving and cracking, the moss tearing asunder-
and behind me the others: my brothers
forgotten since dawn.
The speaker develops a kind of stutter, a pattern of hesitations that he
keeps struggling to move past. Levertov uses spacing and line ends as
punctuation to signify pauses between the lines. In reading these lines
aloud the body rocks forward on the phrases, and back into the silences.
The correspondence between the theme of "wrenching" roots from the
earth and the syncopated phrasing results in a strong sense of
movement, a quickening of feeling, and a probing into the ancient,
mythic depths of consciousness. Even so, this difficult movement is not
319
yet over, for the singer tells us that all the trees go th
wrenching; through the sympathetic and contagious magic
the readers will also experience the drama of upheaval.
Orpheus's lyre reaches the "others":
In the forest
they too had heard,
and were pulling their roots in pain
out of a thousand years' layers of dead leaves,
rolling the rocks away,
breaking themselves
out of their depths.
The poem becomes all action as language tries to follow inspiration, to
hold on to the Muse. The images and rhythm underscore upheaval and
call to mind a similar passage in Rilke's "Third Elegy," transposed by
George Quasha. The passage sings of the poet's turmoil; the modern
poet goes through an initiatory experience of descent and dismember-
ment privately, within:
-How he
gave himself to it
-Loved.
Loved his inner world, his inner jungle,
that primal forest within
on whose dumb overthrownness
greenlit his heart stood
Loved. Left it, continued
into his own roots and out
into violent beginning
where his small birth was
already outlived
: Descended
lovingly into older blood into gorges
where great Fright lurked still full of fathers
(206-07)
Here as in Levertov's poem the myth of descent is enacted
rhythmically, spatially, as well as in the imagery. These lines give us a
picture of what has been traditionally described as "hell," the
underworld. But the poet is happy there: "Horror smiled at him" (207).
In Levertov's poem the trees suffer the physical pain of tearing out
their roots, and yet their focus is music, not pain:
You would have thought we would lose the sound of the lyre,
of the singing,
so dreadful the storm-sounds were, where there was no storm,
no wind but the rush of our
320
branches moving, our trunks breasting the

But the music!
The music reached us.
The music is so compelling that the trees must follow, "clumsi

stumbling over our own roots." Like Baudelaire's albatross, anoth
figure for the poet himself, the trees become clumsy creatures whe
they move out of their element. But they are destined to follow
Muse. And despite their awkwardness they learn "to dance." Orph
teaches them, step by step, combining words and movements in
dance: "and words he said/taught us to leap and to wind in and o
around one another in figures the lyre's measure designed." Th
Muse sings his farewell, but leaves gently, calming the trees
nurturing them with his song:
In the last light of that day his song became
farewell.
He stilled our longing.
He sang our sun-dried roots back into earth,
watered them: all-night rain of music so quiet
we could almost
not hear it in the
moonless dark.
Preparing to end the poem, Levertov provides quiet music in the

manner of Orpheus, who, like Apollo, was noted for generatin
calmness. In this passage we can see the importance of each syllable
toward the rhythm of the whole poem. Where Levertov separates the
article from the noun in "the/moonless dark" we pay close attention to
this change in ordinary syntax. The separation highlights the image of
"moonless dark," placing a heavy stress on "moon" and again on "dark."
Both rhythmically and in terms of the picture the line makes, the
phrasing makes sense. Without moonlight the scene returns to
darkness; without an article, the line's music conveys smoothness and
preparation to begin the creative cycle again.
The narrative voice of the poem repeats "it is said" to tell of
Orpheus's unsuccessful journey to the underworld, and his triumph in
singing beyond his doom. The tree becomes philosophical about pain as
a source of learning and creative power:
Perhaps he will not return.
But what we have lived
comes back to us.
We see more.
We feel, as our rings increase,
321
something that lifts our branches, that stretches our f

leaf-tips
further.
The wind, the birds,
do not sound poorer but clearer,
recalling our agony, and the way we danced.
The music!
The ending soothes us. The singer is gone, but we find no end to th
music-it resonates into silence. We feel as if we stand at the edge of a
calm lake, whose depths we have glimpsed, watching the ripple
subside. Everything seems "clearer" as the world is restored through
music. The three beats of "We see more" emphasize the spiritual action
of the whole poem, which is to journey through darkness to clarity. Lik
the shaman and the seer, the poet and the reader go through the
initiatory cycle of passing through the "moonless dark" in order to see
with new eyes. One thing we see is Levertov's vision of the poem a
movement, as an extended "dance figure" left in wake of the Muse.
In its refusal to be a still life, an object, Levertov's poem represents
one of the more interesting incarnations of poetry in the twentiet
century. For one hallmark of poetry today is change, movement, and a
focus on the moment, rather than on the poem as a single lyric object, a
focus on "kinetics" rather than on trying to build monuments against
time. Levertov's poem represents a graceful encounter with time, a
ballet embracing both change and constancy: "What does not change/is
the will to change" (Olson, "As the Dead" 2). In "A Tree Telling of
Orpheus" Levertov is both the choreographer and the performer of her
vision-her work becomes what Yeats summoned, the supple dance
and the dance. As readers we are invited to join in, to complete the
score with our voices, to actively celebrate poetry and the imagination in
our time.
WORKS CITED
Allen, Donald M., and Warren Tallman, eds. The Poetics of the New
Poetry. New York: Grove, 1973.
Duncan, Robert. Roots and Branches. New York: Scribner's, 1964. 48-53.
._ The Truth & Life of Myth. Freemont, MI: Sumac, 1968.
Guthrie, W.K.C. Orpheus and Greek Religion. London: Methuen, 1935.
Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. New York: Ecco, 1984, 1987.
Levertov, Denise. "A Tree Telling of Orpheus." Stony Brook 1/2 (1968): 20-23.
Momaday, Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
1969.
322
Olson, Charles. "As the Dead Prey Upon Us." The New American Poe
M. Allen, Ed. New York: Grove, 1960. 27-33.
. "For Sappho, Back." In Cold Hell, In Thicket. San Francisco: Four
Seasons, 1967.
. Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1950.
. "The Kingfishers." Allen. 2.
Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in
America. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
Quasha, George. "A Test of Translation VI: Rilke's Third Duino Elegy."
Caterpillar 3/4 (1968): 200-208.
Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Langzuage. New York: Norton, 1978.
Von Franz, Marie-Louise. Creation Myths. Zurich: Spring Publications, 1972.
Williams, William Carlos. "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." Pictures from
Breughel. New York: New Directions, 1962. 153-82.
. "Letters to Denise Levertov." Stony Brook 1/2 (1968): 161-68.
. "Rain." The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. I. A. Walton
Litz and Christopher MacGowan, Eds. Ed. New York: New Directions,
1986. 343.
. The Selected Letters of Williamn Carlos Williams. John C. Thirlwall, Ed. N
York: McDowell, 1957.
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Moistening Our Roots with Music: Creative Power in Denise Levertov's "A Tree Telling of

"A Tree Telling of Orpheus"

The sources of power in Denise Levertov's poem "A Tree Telling

propelling the narrative, the sustained rhythm of Levertov's

revelation of content" (PW 13). Like Duncan, Levertov bel

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

and on sleekness and movement (Selected 19). There must

really waiting for with open arms, is to be ready" ("Letters" 1

Levertov's poem, as reproduced here, is widely availab

White dawn. Stillness. When the rippling began

I was the first to see him, for I grew

He came still closer, leaned on my trunk:

And at the heart of my wood

All day we followed, up hill and down.

we came to this place I stand in, this knoll

Orpheus, proto-poet, Thracian son of Kalliope, one of th

possibilities that underscores content. Quoting Lewis H

Personification is the poet's obvious tool for evoking creative power.

naming, its palpable evocation of the hero's body, much as oral

Orpheus has no warrior attributes. The calm which surr

This evocation of receiving language through the body reminds us of

rehearsing in her body, hearing-out in her blood/ a score touche

I was seed again.

crossed at all. The X factor, the magic, is when we come

branches moving, our trunks breasting the

The music is so compelling that the trees must follow, "clumsi

Preparing to end the poem, Levertov provides quiet music in the

something that lifts our branches, that stretches our f

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