Eat the World

Denise Levertov is one of my favorite poets. She's usually lumped into the feminist poets category due to her poems on the subject of marriage. However, she's also thought of as a Vietnam War activist. I think of her simply as a lovely poet whose words pack a punch to my gut. When it comes to words, that's a good feeling.

The first non-rhyming poem I ever memorized was Levertov's "O Taste and See." Its simple beauty captures, for me, both my feelings about nature and what it feels like to engage in the world as a poet. She wrote it as a kind of response to everyone's favorite Romantic, William Wordsworth. In his sonnet "The World Is Too Much with Us," he laments the modern world's disconnection from nature--the place where he believes the truest experiences of the world to reside.

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Levertov sees nature in experience, rather than the other way around. At every turn we are being called to incorporate the joys and sorrows of the world into ourselves--there is nothing that is not extraordinary. She claimed that the final line of this poem came to her in a dream, and many of her poems depict dream-like images. Here it is for you to soak in:

O TASTE AND SEE

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.