The very first poem in the collection "Human Being" interrupted me. The poem captures so much of the tensions of religious experience in a secular age, tensions I highlight in Hunting Magic Eels. These are tensions Levertov wrestled with, as have I, especially during my long season of doubt and deconstruction.
Given all this, I thought I'd do a series giving "Human Being" a close reading. By no means will I try to "explain" the poem to you. I simply want to share how I think the poem captures our experience of God in those spaces between faith and doubt, spaces particularly diagnostic of secularity and modernity. In that sense, this series is less about poetry and more about the phenomenology of religious experience in our increasingly post-Christian culture.
To get us started, you need to read the poem. Here is "Human Being" by Denise Levertov:
Human being—walking
in doubt from childhood on: walking
a ledge of slippery stone in the world’s woods
deep-layered with set leaves—rich or sad: on one
side of the path, ecstasy, on the other
dull grief. Walking
the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
thoroughfares, wide boulevards
that hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers.
Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall, the wall
of brick that crumbles and is replaced,
of twisted iron,
of rock,
the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:
Children and animals
who cannot learn
anything from suffering
suffer, are tortured, die
in incomprehension.
The human being, each night nevertheless
summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,
or hand’s touch
on the lamp-switch—darkness,
silently utters,
impelled as if by a need to cup the palms
and drink from a river,
the words, 'Thanks.
Thanks for this day, a day of my life.'
And wonders.
Pulls up the blankets, looking
into nowhere, always in doubt.
And takes strange pleasure
in having repeated once more the childish formula,
a pleasure in what is seemly.
And drifts to sleep, downstream
on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,
the wall shadowy, that tomorrow
will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadow
into the day’s brilliance.
