Denise Levertov poem

Denise Levertov remains one of my favorite Christian poets (a qualifier I make reluctantly given that she is a great poet, period.). You can read a short profile of her here. Like with so many great poets whose passion, art, and vision was informed by their faith—and found expression through their art—characteristically there ever hardly is any mention of her deep personal faith in most references about her. Reading most of the profiles on her one would never guess she was a devout Christian.

The following poem, suitable for the Lenten season, is from a small collection of her religious poems in The Stream & the Sapphire: Selected poems on religious themes (New Directions Books: 1997). Her collections are well worth collecting and savoring.



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Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis

Maybe He looked indeed
much as Rembrandt envisioned Him
in those small heads that seemed in fact
portraits of more than a model.
A dark, still young, very intelligent face,
a sould-mirror gaze of deep understanding, unjudging.
That face, in extremis, would have clenched its teeth
in a grimace not shown in even the great crucifixions.
The burden of humanness (I begin to see) exacted from Him
that He taste also the humiliation of dread,
cold sweat of wanting to let the whole thing go,
like any mortal hero out of his depth,
like anyone who has taken a step too far
and wants herself back.
The painters, even the greatest, don’t show how,
in the midnight Garden,
or staggering uphill with even the human longing
to simply cease, to not be.
Not torture of body,
not the hideous betrayals humans commit
not the faithless weakness of friends, and surely
not the anticipation of death (not then, in agony’s grip)
was Incarnation’s heaviest weight,
but this sickened desire to renege,
to step back from what He, Who was God,
had promised Himself, and had entered
time and flesh to enact.
Sublime acceptance, to be absolute, had to have welled
up from those depths where purpose
drifted for mortal moments.

–Denise Levertov

(art by Israel Galindo)
Make a good Lent.

About igalindo

Israel Galindo is Professor and Associate Dean for Lifelong Learning at Columbia Theological Seminary.
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