Peter Levi*

Peter Levi (1931―2000) is a poet, translator, novelist, and scholar. He wrote more than 60 books, including fiction, biography, poetry, and travel writing. He was raised in a devout Catholic family, where all three siblings chose a vocation within the church — he and his brother became Jesuit priests, and his sister a Bernadine nun.

He was a classics tutor at Campion Hall, Oxford from 1965 to 1977, then left the Jesuit order for marriage and a literary life. When asked why, he replied, "It was love."

In an interview with the Paris Review around the time he left the priesthood he was asked about his experience and his view of the sermon as a creative medium. He replied,
------"Oh I think it’s very interesting. Donne’s sermons are wonderful.
------An opportunity not open to most human beings of having a captive
------audience. I think it is much unexploited and I think it has
------thrilling potentialities, but of course only if you happen to
------believe what you’re saying. And it so happens that I did. I mildly
------regret not being able to preach any more sermons."

Peter Levi was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1984 to 1989. The following excerpts are from his long poem “Ruined Abbeys.”

From Ruined Abbeys

------Monastic limestone skeleton,
------threadbare with simple love of life
------speak out your dead language of stone,
------the wind’s hammer, the sun’s knife,
------the sweet apple of solitude;
------there is a ninth beatitude:
------a child in his simplicity
------is more than a just man can be.

It is not a poem that is easy to analyse, dwelling in the physicality of abandoned stone structures, and in Levi’s experience of how words take on a life of their own.

------Watching all this in an armchair
------consider what these ruins are,
------desolate spirits in the air
------singing in their stone languages
------what religion is not and is,
------not a museum but a stone
------no man can understand alone:

The stanza I would particularly like to highlight is the following — from toward the end of this 417-line poem.

------It ends in death, the old land.
------Darkness climbs into the sky.
------There is nothing left in your hand.
------It gives you no guide to go by.
------Or nothing that a stinging-nettle
------on a bleak stone will not unsettle.
------You who believe my true story
------are not protected from history.
------What can I say about death;
------their death is hidden from my eyes:
------but I believe that the dead rise,
------having been roused by the strong breath
------of my God who is in heaven,
------when the trumpet tears earth open.

To read the entire poem, follow this link.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Peter Levi: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Peter Levi

Peter Levi (1931—2000) is a British poet whose father was Jewish and Mother was Roman Catholic. He became a Jesuit novice when he was just 17, and became a priest. He left the priesthood in 1977 to get married. In 1984 he became Oxford Professor of Poetry. He wrote more than twenty volumes of poetry including: The Gravel Ponds (1960), Death Is A Pulpit (1971) and Reed Music (2007). He also edited The Penguin Book of English Christian Verse (1984).

When The Paris Review asked for his advice to young writers, part of what he said was, "Steer clear of the writing departments of universities..." and then he added, "Writing is like breathing or it ought to be. One’s got to write poems. Like one has to go to church. Not out of social duty, or because there’s any pressure on one to do so. Not even out of reaction to people who say one shouldn’t do so. But just because of some decent, natural good behavior. One might as well go on with it."

The following poem was included in the anthology British Poetry Since 1945 by Edward Lucie-Smith (Penguin).

"To speak about the soul"

To speak about the soul.
I wake early. You don't sleep in summer.
In the morning a dead-eyed nightingale is still awake in you.
What has been done and suffered
with whatever is left to be suffered
is in the soul.
Oracles are given elsewhere. Their speech is announced with
------bronze.

In the early morning
you see women walking to the sanctuaries:
a light touch of sun on the whitewash:
a light touch of fire burning the oil.
You tell me nothing.
This is the desert I will write about.
The desert is not an island: the island is not enchanted: and the
------desert is no habitation for men.
The bird with the burnt eyes sang sweetest.
A desert further off
One small simple cloud. Heat at midday. A little constellated
------handwriting. Heat at midnight.
You never say.
To be woken by hearing
the voices of the enchanted birds
and the voices of the disenchanted birds.

Say what is like a tree, like a river, like a mountain, a cloud over
------the sun?
My memory has been overshadowed
by that live light and by that dying light.

The soul is no more than human.

The rising sky is as wide as the desert.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Peter Levi: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Elizabeth Jennings

English poet, Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001) lived most of her life in Oxford. She belongs in the first tier of postwar British poets — associated with the group known as “The Movement”, which also includes Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Her poems are structured with simple metre and rhyme, giving them a gentle lilt. Besides writing her own poetry, she translated Michelangelo’s sonnets.

Elizabeth Jennings often wrote about paintings and about her faith. The two come together well in her poem “The Nature of Prayer” where she reflects on Van Gogh’s “crooked church” from the painting “The Church at Auvers”.
-------------Maybe a mad fit made you set it there
-------------Askew, bent to the wind, the blue-print gone
-------------Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer
-------------We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,
-------------Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?...
Although she avoided autobiographical poetry, she freely wrote about mental illness, which troubled her life, as it had for Vincent Van Gogh.

In 1985 the poet Peter Levi said of Jennings in The Spectator, “She is one of the few living poets one could not do without”. She received many honours and awards throughout her career, including a C.B.E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1992.

Lazarus

-----It was the amazing white, it was the way he simply
Refused to answer our questions, it was the cold pale glance
Of death upon him, the smell of death that truly
Declared his rising to us. It was no chance
Happening, as a man may fill a silence
Between two heart-beats, seem to be dead and then
Astonish us with the closeness of his presence;
This man was dead, I say it again and again.
All of our sweating bodies moved towards him
And our minds moved too, hungry for finished faith.
He would not enter our world at once with words
That we might be tempted to twist or argue with:
Cold like a white root pressed in the bowels of earth
He looked, but also vulnerable — like birth.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Elizabeth Jennings: second post, third post

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca