Levertov introduces her forebears in “Illustrious Ancestors” (1958). The Hasidic grandfather, the rabbi from “Northern White Russia,” learns the “language of birds” from nature-centered concentration during his devotions. Similarly pragmatic, a Welsh grandfather, “Angel Jones of Mold,” incorporates his mysticism in the real world by stitching his thoughts into his garments. At the poem’s conclusion, the poet begins with “Well” her inclusion of birds, hard data, and the tailor’s needle in her life’s work. In silence, she contemplates the thin-air quality of internalized stimuli.
Composed four years after Levertov’s divorce, “A Woman Alone” (1978) delights in “blessed Solitude,” the reward to an aging woman lost in a paradox of “sober euphoria.” Stepping over breezy enjambments from a memory of passion to an involved late-night conversation that prefaces sleeping alone among books, she has no need to banish self-pity, which “dries up” of its own volition. More fearful of attrition than manlessness, the poet-speaker pictures an active old age, “a wanderer, / seamed and brown.” Slightly ridiculous as “Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby” from The Water-Babies, she acknowledges that the world rejects that winsome Victorian fantasy. At home in the realities of urban life, she chooses instead to be “tough and wise” in a newfound contentment.
Published the year after her mother’s death, “Death in Mexico” (1978) traverses the final stages of life. The poem moves through a self-revelatory grief to contrasting forms as a garden returns from the imposed ideal to the wild. As though depicting in metaphor the retreat of health over a five-week decline, the text vivifies the “squared circle” of her mother’s garden destroyed in a month after twenty years of tending. Prefiguring a processional to the grave, line 31 pictures the gardener, borne past her garden on a stretcher, as too blind to focus on the transformation of her garden. Building on the image of blurred vision, the poet-speaker turns to the obdurate masks of stone “gods and victims,” whose fixed gaze allows no response to life, even that which crawls like a vine or scorpion over the face. Alienated by death and Mexican exotica, the speaker pictures the garden as her mother’s hostage, summarily retrieved into its natural surroundings.
