Sands of the Well

...She imagines sand sifting slowly down through a well's pool of water...

...Levertov calls her reader to a larger world, yet at no time suggests that this world of escape is the world in which we should live...

...Finally she remarks, stillness ensues, and the mystery of that sheer clarity, is it water indeed, or air, or light...

...Because she calls us to stop, to consider, to see, she necessarily calls us to meditate, to contemplate, and to pray.e, to contemplate, and to pray...

...In "What One Receives from Living Close to a Lake," a body of water surrounded by a forest serves as a complex metaphor for human consciousness...

...Here memory intervenes to recall both a party of rowdy Russians, going off to picnic and hunt mushrooms, and then, jumping ahead three decades, a lake in Hanoi, a point of tranquillity in the chaos of a city under bombardment...

...Each poem reformulates some variant of the questions, "How do we know what we know...

...The poem begins with the observation that, though the poet usually walks alone in the woods, when she takes a more crowded path she always finds something pleasing: an old woman fishing from the end of a pier...

...In "Swan in Falling Snow" and "The Great Black Heron," Levertov uses the image of a bird to reveal the observed world we often overlook...

...In the second poem, the heron does not appear until the final word...

...Levertov's poetry reveals the almost infinite power of metaphor...

...Paradoxically, however, it is when we lose track of our own obsessions, our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute, an hour even...

...With that simple affirmation, the poet has gone from the opening tranquillity of a walk in the woods, to chaos and confusion, and back to the primordial and elemental identity between person and nature...

...From her vantage above, the poet watches the water return to motionless equilibrium, only to stir the surface again and put the grains of sand back into motion...

...Many of Levertov's poems are self-referential, and use self-reference to elucidate phenomena commonly thought to be the concern of philosophy, psychology, or physics...

...She writes finely honed, intensely accurate descriptions in the conviction that all things-writer, reader, and world- constitute one overarching manifestation of the presence of God...

...In "Sojourns in the Parallel World," the poet addresses the mind's well-known but scarcely understood tendency to turn away from the sensed, objective world to a world of imagination...

...By telling the obvious in ways that surprise, she recalls us to a level of existence so fundamental that it risks being ignored...

...and "What do we know...

...A poem that seemed to be little more than a depiction of a winter scene turns into a manifestation of the commonplace...

...Far from it, our consciousness necessarily returns to the domesticated world, but renewed and refreshed, so that we can go on "to evolve our destinies...

...There is no movement, except the falling snow, and the poem simply records the scene's features until concluding, "The short day / suspended itself, endless...

...In the first, brief poem, she observes a swan standing in place...

...Her accomplishment rests on a remarkable ability to exploit the possibilities of figured speech...

...then something tethered in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free...

...In conclusion the poet returns to that old woman and wonders about her past, her battles, and her triumphs: She's gathered up all the time in the world -nothing else-and waits for scanty trophies, complete in herself as a heron...

...Levertov never hesitates to invoke worship and prayer...

...The lake is presented as a reservoir of ordered tranquillity encircled by an "entangled forest of forms and voices, / anxious intentions, urgent memories," and is subtly transformed into something incarnate whose arms, when we draw a "deep clear breath to fill the soul," are flung wide to echo that mute generous outstretching we call lake...

...In the collection's title poem, "Sands of the Well," Levertov again associates water with introspection...