Denise Levertov - Two Dead Serious Poems For The Season

On The Mystery Of The Incarnation

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

Advent 1966

Because in Vietnam the vision of a Burning Babe

is multiplied, multiplied,

                         the flesh on fire

not Christ’s, as Soulthwell saw it, prefiguring

the Passion upon the Eve of Christmas,

but wholly human and repeated, repeated,

infant after infant, their names forgotten,

Their sex unknown in the ashes,

set alight, flaming but not vanishing,

not vanishing, as his vision but lingering.

cinders upon the earth or living on

moaning and stinking in hospitals three abed;

because of this my strong sight,

my clear caressive sight, my poets sight I was given

that it might stir me to song,

Is blurred.

           There is a cataract filming over

my inner eyes.  Or else a monstrous insect

has entered my head, and looks out

from my sockets with multiple vision ,

seeing not the unique Holy Infant

burning sublimely, an imagination of redemption,

furnace in which souls are wrought into new life,

but, as off a beltline, more, senseless figures aflame.

And this insect (who is not there-

it is my own eyes do my seeing, the insect

is not there, what I see is there)

will not permit me to look elsewhere,

or if I look, to see except dulled and unfocused

the delicate, firm whole flesh of the still unburned.

Christmas is too important to just let it be just merry.