On The "Olga Poems"
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:
Black one, black one
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 timeshe 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.
Early Version . . . how you always all history that kind candle. |
Final Poem ... how you always that kind candle.
|
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 againFinal:
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 Greenstedcrossing the ploughlands whose color I named 'murple'
a shade between brown and lavender
that we lovedHow 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:
she muttered into my childhood . . .Everything flows
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 maresover 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 hollyyour 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 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 which the poet was not present), and a search for "a clearing in the selva oscura"—a reference not only to Olga’s favorite poem "Selva Oscura" by Louis MacNiece but an oblique reference as well to Dante’s "dark wood." For our purposes, the poem is a crucial road sign in the development of Levertov’s social consciousness, for Olga was a political activist; and, indeed, in later poems about anti-war activity, Olga appears like a benevolent ghost on the fringes of the crowd. The poems are part of a larger section, "The Sorrow Dance," and the first mention of Olga comes in "A Lamentation" preceding the "Olga Poems." In the poem, it is Olga who dances "Sorrow" and the younger sister who dances "Summer":
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.
And my dance
was Summer—they rouged my cheeks
and twisted roses with wire stems into my hair.
"A Lamentation" is grief, recollected joy of youth, and grief dismissed. It is something of a prelude to the six poems that follow. As often in Levertov’s most troubled poems, there is a hint of the leavening moment—of joy, of nostalgia, of humor: "(and the little sister / beady-eyed in the bed— / or drowsy, was I? My head / a camera—)"—to balance the "bones and tatters of flesh in earth." The "Olga Poems" offer a portrait of a headstrong, idealistic, intelligent, fated woman who set herself against the world to "shout the world to its senses." Olga’s social conscience evoked here swept in the great inequalities around her that she could not deny and militated against. The poet traces Olga’s journey in search of "a clearing / in the selva oscura": ". . .What rage for order / disordered her pilgrimage—so that for years at a time / she would hide among strangers." Olga’s tortured story is interspersed with memories of childhood that persist. "Your life winds in me," the poet writes, remembering childhood pleasures. The poem is replete with visual and tactile images of Olga’s striking beauty framed by her intellect and sensitivity. "Your eyes were the brown gold of pebbles under water. . . . And by other streams in other countries anywhere where the light / reaches down through shallows to gold gravel. Olga’s / brown eyes."
The moving final lines of the poem are not only a glowing collage of the golds and browns and olivewood of the entire sequence, but a poignant reminder for the mature Levertov, her own sense of protest aroused by the "human shame" she now experienced, poised on the threshold of decision, yet still looking toward Olga for guidance:
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. . .
The metaphors in the poem—Olga herself, the figures of "dancing" and Sorrow’s black and silver tunic—deepen the otherwise personal utterance. Olga is inspiration, keeping "compassion’s candle alight," and this is the Olga whom Levertov will recall. In this crucial poem, Levertov has revealed the source of her own pilgrimage—social consciousness but one leavened by compassion and hope and vision. This was her own interpretation of Olga’s legacy.
Thus the "Olga Poems" are both personal and universal—as fine elegies are meant to be. The theme is both private and public, for it addresses the poet’s own problem of finding a "clearing / in the selva oscura," and the dilemma posed by the need for the artist to speak out of the experience within, responding to the disorder of the world without. The language of the poems is controlled and evocative, sensuous at times, coldly realistic at times, the figurative language both immediate and symbolic in its overtones.
On your hospital bed you lay
in love, the hatreds
that had followed you, a
comet’s tail, burned out
as your disasters bred of love
burned out,
while pain and drugs
quarreled like sisters in you—
The emotion is strong, but it is reigned in by the necessity of looking past the poet’s grief for her dead sister and toward the immediacy of her own concerns as both artist and "poet of the world." The "Olga Poems" testify to the belief that Levertov was able to combine her aesthetic gift with what would become now a lifelong concern: the need to give expression to her social consciousness, careful not to betray her artistic calling.
Olga is a haunting echo in Levertov’s poetry—a motif that appears and reappears as Levertov groups her poetry—not according to chronology, she points out, but according to theme. Thus, in as late a volume as Breathing the Water, a poem "To Olga" appears. It is a poignant backward glance at childhood, before they spoke "less and less." Most moving is the penultimate stanza that reveals Levertov’s remarkable ability for portraying the sisters "benighted but not lost":
I felt the veil
of sadness descendbut I was never afraid for us,
we were benighted but not lost, and I trusted
utterly that at last,
however late, we’d get home.
No owl, no lights, the dun ridges
of ploughland fading. No matter.
I trusted you.
Whatever Levertov’s personal feelings about her "brave . . . lost" sister, Olga shines in her poetry like an exiled spark.
[. . . .]
One senses that Denise Levertov’s sister, Olga, an activist through most of her brief life, is ever present in Levertov’s consciousness—and particularly when her themes are driven by conscience. "A Note to Olga, 1966" is the poet’s account of a peaceful rally to "Stop the War." The hue and cry had already spread throughout the country. Olga is the ghostly presence supporting the demonstration as the haunting words of "We Shall Overcome" linger in the air:
Though I forget you
a red coal from your fire
burns in that box.
The lost sister seems to be one with the "limp and ardent" protesters dragged off in the police paddy-wagon. As I have already noted, the poet conjures up the vision of Olga in her own moments of "engagement," who would have proudly marched with those who shuffle along in the dark snow. From this point, Levertov recounts her role as an activist in an already popular cause. The poem is yet another perspective on the war—group action—which Levertov chronicles in future poems. While this is history, it is also poetry, because "A Note to Olga" with its poignant memories and comparisons of past and present activism is also reinforced by the form of the poem: its stanzaic pattern, its regular meter, and its sharp and unusual images—especially the opening image—visual and tactile— which sets the tone of the poem:
Of lead and emerald
the reliquary
that knocks my breastbone,slung round my neck
on a rough invisible rope
that rubs the knob of my spine.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To Stay Alive, Denise Levertov explained in the "Author’s Preface," is "one person’s inner / outer experience in America during the ‘60's and the beginning of the ‘70's, an experience which is shared by so many and transcends the peculiar details of each life, though it can only be expressed in and through such details." Many of the poems were written while Mitchell Goodman, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and three other war resisters were on trial in the spring of 1968. But the volume also contains several poems, under the section titled Preludes, that had been included in The Sorrow Dance and Relearning the Alphabet: "Olga Poems," "A Note to Olga (1966)" (Olga had died in 1964), "Life at War," "What Were They Like?" "Advent 1966," "Tenebrae," and "Enquiry." The justification for their inclusion, Levertov explains "is esthetic—it assembles separated parts of a whole. . . . that whole being seen as having some value not as mere ‘confessional’ autobiography, but as a document of some historical value. . . ."
Audrey T. Rodgers, Denise Levertov, The Poetry of Engagement. Copyright © 1993 by Fairleigh Dickinson University. Lodon and Toronto.
Richard Jackson
It is an echo consciousness, then, that allows the poet to move from the implied to the explicit. Sartre, in the section on "Concrete Relations With Others" in Being and Nothingness, says "the profound meaning of my being is outside me, imprisoned in an absence" (473). It is certainly appropriate, then, that one of Levertov’s first forays into directly "political" poetry occurs in a sequence, "The Olga Poems" (SD 53-60), that is structured by the echoing consciousness of herself and her sister. The sequence itself has six main sections whose concerns gradually expand—a sort of rippling out of consciousness within a structure that diacritically opposes the personal and the political. The first section is very personal and brackets a particular memory, and leads to the memory of Olga's growing political consciousness in section two. Section three, in three parts, analyzes the concepts of history and time from a phenomenological perspective. The fourth section questions larger patterns of history as opposed to individual awareness; beside Olga's deathbed is a candle—"all history," she says, "burned out, down / to the sick bone, save for / / that kind candle" (SD 57). The fifth section continues the critique of history, attempting to substitute a personal mythology of memories—as the narrator says, "A fairy tale existence." The last section counterpoints this mythic past against the present and a larger history to attempt a dialectic synthesis.
The critical point in the sequence is section three. It begins with a conventional view of time "from the hymnbook" through which the narrator and her sister were "linked to words we loved" "Time like an ever-rolling stream / bears all its sons away." Through memory she is able to "inhale a sense of her [sister's] livingness in that instant," and a sense of the way her sister attempted to extend beyond the childhood confinements of their garden wall, their way of life. For her sister, this was a matter of revolutionary restructuring—"To change, / to change the course of the river! What rage for order / disordered her pilgrimage." The flow of the river implied fate, acceptance; now Levertov can understand time in its historical movement, in its consciousness of "dream," absence, the "unremembered," ''as unfolding, not flowing, the pilgrim years." Unfolding implies choice, openness; it is a notion that she will refer to later in "Staying Alive"—"I want the world to go on / unfolding" (SA 29)—with a more political, day-to-day consciousness. Here in the Olga poems, unfolding suggests the way Olga's life and political perspective "winds in me." The climax of the poem in the last section is a kind of encomium on Olga's eyes, the way they provoke and are the focal point of memories; what the narrator sees in those eyes, beyond the associations of what the narrator herself sees and how her sister could "sightread " Beethoven, is fear: "I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born, / the fear in them." It is as if Olga could foresee the failures and tortures of her own life, the failed political movements of her time. The sequence ends with the narrator attempting to decipher the memory of her sister's gaze; while there is an "echo of our unknowing there" as there is in "Night on Hatchet Cove," there is also a faith that Olga's eyes knew, and that the narrator might learn from them. The glitter of the elsewhere, the nothing, becomes, here, the possible light of vision:
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. . . .
Behind the gaze of the surface, then, and into the depths—what the narrator attempts to do, as she says in "Who Is At My Window" (OT 50), is to "move deeper into today," to ignore the fears that plague thoughts about the future, that plague Olga, or that plague the narrator in "Travels."
from "A Common Time: The Poetry of Denise Levertov." Sagetrieb Vol. 5, No. 2.
Nancy J. Sisko
In "Prelude," Levertov returns to her youth when her feelings about war and peace were formed in response to her sister Olga's example. Levertov does not mention herself very often in this first section, and then only as a young girl watching her older sister as she tries to "save the world." Olga, then, becomes a standard against which Levertov will judge herself throughout the rest of the book; Levertov remembers her sister as a person who "wanted / to shout the world to its senses / . . . to browbeat / the poor into joy's / socialist republic" ( 4 ). Olga seeks to make possible the impossible, to "change the course of the river" (5).
Though Levertov doesn't feel as if she can compare with Olga in most categories, she does rival her in some ways. Towards the end of the "Olga Poems," Levertov describes her sister as living in "the year [she was] most alone" (8). All her life she was alone, alone in her dreams, and alone in her failures; Levertov feels much the same way, and the same sense of loneliness and despair pervades the entirety of To Stay Alive. After the "Olga Poems," Levertov has included the poem "A Note to Olga (1966)," which also appeared first in A Sorrow Dance, though it was not originally grouped with the "Olga Poems" in that book. In this poem Levertov appears grown up now, marching in a "Stop the War" demonstration (11). She is reminded of her sister's voice and in the final stanza uses her poetic sensibilities to re-envision the event, transplanting her sister into it, and then seeing Olga arrested: "It seem / you that is lifted / limp and ardent / off the dark snow / and shoved in, and driven away" (12). Wanting to be like her sister, Levertov marches in protest, but symbolically her sister's presence eludes her, is "driven away," leaving Levertov alone, still trying to capture the essence of Olga's vision.
Levertov is the "beady-eyed . . . sister" with her "head / a camera" (3). These are the young eyes of a poet, recording, seeking to understand what has been seen. In the final poem of the Olga group, Levertov memorializes Olga's eyes that "were the brown gold of pebbles under water" and writes that there are "so many questions my eyes / smart to ask your eyes" (10). Her sister’s eyes are able to see in a way her "camera" eyes cannot: Olga has "eyes with some vision / of festive goodness" (10). And it is that utopian vision that Levertov will spend the rest of To Stay Alive" trying to capture.
from "To Stay Alive: Levertov's Search for a Revolutionary Poetry." Sagetrieb, Vol. 5, No. 2
Richard Jackson
It is certainly appropriate, then, that one of Levertov's first forays into directly "political" poetry occurs in a sequence, "The Olga Poems" (SD 53-60), that is structured by the echoing consciousnesses of herself and her sister. The sequence itself has six main sections whose concerns gradually expand—a sort of rippling out of consciousness within a structure that dialectically opposes the personal and the political. The first section is very personal and brackets a particular memory, and leads to the memory of Olga's growing political consciousness in section two. Section three, in three parts, analyzes the concepts of history and time from a phenomenological perspective. The fourth section questions larger patterns of history, as opposed to individual awareness; beside Olga's deathbed is a candle—"all history," she says, "burned out, down / to the sick bone, save for / / that kind candle" (SD 57). The fifth section continues the critique of history, attempting to substitute a personal mythology of memories, as the narrator says—"A fairy tale existence." The last section counterpoints this mythic past against the present and a larger history to attempt, a dialectic synthesis.
The critical point in the sequence is section three. It begins with a conventional view of time "from the hymnbook" through which the narrator and her sister were "linked to words we loved"—"Time like an ever-rolling stream / bears all its sons away." Through memory she is able to "inhale a sense of her [sister's] livingness in that instant," and a sense of the way her sister attempted to extend beyond the childhood confinements of their garden wall, their way of life. For her sister, this was a matter of revolutionary restructuring—"To change, / to change the course of the river! What rage for order / disordered her pilgrimage." The flow of the river implied fate, acceptance; now Levertov can understand time in its historical movement, in its consciousness of "dream," absence, the "unremembered," ''as unfolding, not flowing, the pilgrim years." Unfolding implies choice, openness; it is a notion that she will refer to later in "Staying Alive"—"I want the world to go on unfolding" (SA 29)—with a more political, day-to-day consciousness. Here in the Olga poems, unfolding suggests the way Olga's life and political perspective "winds in me." The climax of the poem in the last section is a kind of encomium on Olga's eyes, the way they provoke and are the focal point of memories; what the narrator sees in those eyes, beyond the associations of what the narrator herself sees and how her sister could "sightread" Beethoven, is fear: "I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born, / the fear in them." It is as if Olga could foresee the failures and tortures of her own life, the failed political movements of her time. The sequence ends with the narrator attempting to decipher the memory of her sister's gaze; while there is an "echo of our unknowing there," as there is in "Night on Hatchet Cove," there is also a faith that Olga's eyes knew, and that the narrator might learn from them. The glitter of the elsewhere, the nothing, becomes, here, the possible light of vision:
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. . . .
from The Dismantling of Time in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.
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