American Romanticism
Student Poetry Presentation 2008

Thursday 30 October: Denise Levertov, "The Jacob's Ladder," N 2553

poetry reader / discussion leader: Dawlat Yassin

                                     "The Jacob’s Ladder” By Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov’s life, background and influences on her poetry:

-Denise Levertov was born in Ilford, Essex, England. Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, was Welsh. Her father, Paul Levertoff, immigrated to England from Germany. A Russian Hassidic Jew, after converting to Christianity he became an Anglican parson. He retained interest in Judaism and told Hasidic legends to Levertov and her sister Olga throughout their childhood.

- While being educated at home, Levertov showed an enthusiasm for writing from an early age, even claiming later in life that, when she was five years old, she had declared she would be a writer. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. In 1940, when she was 17, Levertov published her first poem.

-In 1947 Levertov married an American, Mitchell Goodman (they later divorced) and moved to the United States. She described this move as crucial to her development as a poet. She is an American poet with a European heritage; her poetry carries the influence of “the old great ones”(Ezra Pound, Williams and H. D.) . She is also influenced by the German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

-1959-1975 Vietnam War; Levertov lectured and wrote against the war; feminism and activism became prominent in her literature.

-Levertov carried on in her own distinctive way H. D.’s tradition of visionary poetry. She observed the natural world and celebrated everyday life, connecting both the physical and the spiritual in a unique vivid manner.

                                           “The Jacob’s Ladder”

The stairway is not

a thing of gleaming strands

a radiant evanescence

for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not

touch the stone.

It is of stone.

A rosy stone that takes

a glowing tone of softness

only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, doubting

night gray

A stairway of sharp

angles, solidly built.

One sees that the angels must spring

Down from one step to the next, giving a little

Lift of the wings:

And a man climbing

must scrape his knees, and bring

the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone

consoles his groping feet. Wings brush past him.

The poem ascends

Levertov invokes the biblical story of Jacob’s dream.  Since the biblical story is about a dream, it fits Levertov’s tradition of visionary poetry. The biblical Jacob’s ladder is mysterious and Levertov’s one is too. The first involves angels going up and down to heaven and a God promising his prophet to increase his people, and make his posterity as “dust on earth”.  The second is of either ethereal or light material where the angels go up and down on it and their feet never touch the stone. Levertov increases the sense of mystery by denying the gleaming and radiant nature of the stairway.

In the second stanza, she tells us that the ladder is stone, but a very special kind of “rosy” soft stones. Behind the Ladder lies a “doubtful” sky; Levertov surrounds the ladder and the sky with a “doubting” “gray” night. Here the doubtfulness of the sky and the hesitation color, “gray”, of the night might stand for the uneasiness of the human soul fluttering between belief and disbelief.

In the third stanza, the stairway takes a kind of stubbornness with its sharp angles and solid design. The angels need some effort to move on, “little lift of the wings”

In the last stanza, a man is climbing with difficulty by the help of his hands and feet, while the movement of the angel’s wings is lighter and easier than his. Here the physical meets and touches the spiritual in a most ambiguous manner. The man stands for mankind and the difficult trip up the ladder stands for human’s physical and spiritual difficulties in life.

Course objectives:

Objective1a:

-Nostalgia for an easy life, both on the physical and spiritual level. This kind of life is unattainable on earth. 

-The sublime is to be found in the nature of the stairway and the journey up on it. The Stairway is both soft and difficult, and the trip is accompanied with danger and difficulties, but at the end there might be an eternal happiness, otherwise why would the Man be traveling on it?

 -The poem involves a spiritual journey as a metaphor for the physical one. The poet transcends physical boundaries and draws both the physical and the spiritual together where man and angels travel on the same ladder.

Questions:

1.Can we consider this poem a romantic one  and why?

2. How do you understand or interpret the second stanza, specifically the “doubtful sky” and the doubtful grey night and connect them to the climbing man’s “groping” feet in the last stanza?

3.Do the sharp angles and the solid building of the stairway connect the poem to the Gothic tradition in romantic literature?

4. Does the poem belong to a unique literary tradition that makes it American and differentiates it from European tradition, or do we consider it American just because of the nationality of the writer?