When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing . Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work―when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. The poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers. Her last forty poems prove her a poet of astounding clarity and vision. -- Poetry Book Club / Academy of American Poets Her poems bring joy to the ear, and, by their transcendental shimmer, inspire a spiritual hunger. -- The Bloomsbury Review , Zoe Anglesey, May/June 2000 [An] earnest examination of the natural world for hints, signs, and traces of the transcendent. -- Freric A. Brussat, spiritualityhealth.com, 15 September 2000 Denise Levertov (1923-1997) was a British born American poet. She wrote and published 20 books of poetry, criticism, translations. She also edited several anthologies. Among her many awards and honors, she received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Frost Medal, the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Lannan Award, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. This Great Unknowing Last Poems By Denise Levertov New Directions Publishing Corporation Copyright © 2000 Denise Levertov All right reserved. ISBN: 9780811214582 Chapter One     FROM BELOW I move among the ankles of forest Elders, tread their moist rugs of moss, duff of their soft brown carpets. Far above, their arms are held open wide to each other, or waving? what they know, what perplexities and wisdoms they exchange, unknown to me as were the thoughts of grownups when in infancy I wandered into a roofed clearing amidst human feet and legs and the massive carved legs of the table, the minds of people, the minds of trees equally remote, my attention then filled with sensations, my attention now caught by leaf and bark at eye level and by thoughts of my own, but sometimes drawn to upgazing?up and up: to wonder about what rises so far above me into the light.     FOR THE ASKING `You would not seek Me if you did nor already possess Me.'                                                        ?Pascal Augustine said his soul was a house so cramped God could barely squeeze in. Knock down the mean partitions, he prayed, so You may enter! Raise the oppressive ceilings!                                Augustine's soul didn't become a mansion large enough to welcome, along with God, the women he'd loved, except for his mother (though one, perhaps, his son's mother, did remain to inhabit a small dark room). God, therefore, would never have felt fully at home as his guest.                                Nevertheless, it's clear desire fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's dynamic action, that scoops out channels like water on stone, or builds like layers of grainy sediment steadily forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought, each feeling, each word he set down, expanded, unnoticed; the roof rose, and a skylight opened.     CELEBRATION Brilliant, this day?a young virtuoso of a day. Morning shadows cut by sharpest scissors, deft hands. And every prodigy of green- whether it's ferns or lichen or needles or impatient points of bud on spindly bushes? greener than ever before.                           And the way the conifers hold new cones to the light for blessing, a festive rite, and sing the oceanic chant the wind transcribes for them! A day that shines in the cold like a first-prize brass band swinging along the street of a coal-dusty village, wholly at odds with the claims of reasonable gloom.     PATIENCE What patience a landscape has, like an old horse, head down in its field.                         Grey days, air and fine rain cling, become one, hovering till at last, languidly, rain relinquishes that embrace, consents to fall. What patience a hill, a plain, a band of woodland holding still, have, and the slow falling of grey rain ... Is it blind faith? Is it merely a way to deeply rest? Is the horse only resigned, or has it some desireable knowledge, an enclosed meadow quite other than its sodden field, which patience is the key to? Has it already, within itself, entered that sunwarmed shelter?     ANCIENT STAIRWAY Footsteps like water hollow the broad curves of stone ascending, descending century by century. Who can say if the last to climb these stairs will be journeying downward or upward?     FIRST LOVE     It was a flower. There had been, before I could even speak, another infant, girl or boy unknown, who drew me?I had an obscure desire to become connected in some way to this other, even to be what I faltered after, falling to hands and knees, crawling a foot or two, clambering up to follow further until arms swooped down to bear me away. But t