address, which carries her into a closer bond with Olga.
The sisters’ estrangement seems to have
several sources, which vary in importance over time. The poet repeatedly draws attention
to the nine years’ difference in their ages by referring to herself as "little
sister," sitting in her "Littlest Bear’s" armchair or riding her bike.
The younger girl apparently resisted growing up and probably resented Olga’s womanly
body. But more than age separates them; their views of life are radically different. Olga
seems to see life and history as relentlessly surging onward, carrying everything
implacably toward disaster: "everything flows." Her dominant impulse appears to
be resistance. And her resistance takes the form of rage that "burns" but
doesn’t accomplish the change she desires, rage equivalent perhaps to that of Sylvia
Plath, or to the "bomb" whose power Emily Dickinson managed only with great
effort and skill to control. Bent on changing the world, Olga attempts to control her
sister, who becomes one of the "human puppets. . . stung into alien semblances by the
lash of her will" (p. 54). Her passion makes her overbearing, manipulative, and
demanding—not the easiest person to love.
Denise, on the other hand, "feels" life
as "unfolding, not flowing" (p. 56). Unlike the overwhelming
river-like"flow" against which Olga struggles, "unfolding" suggests
the opening of a plant—that is, life, and the power of individual life. It implies
the quiet process of gradual growth and assurance about the continuity and the essential
goodness of life. "Unfolding" is thus, at least in this context, more consistent
with the organicism that moves most of Levertov’s poetry. Her different view of life
gives Denise a different mode of action and thought. She is careful, quiet, controlled.
Early in her assessment of Olga and their relationship, this habit sometimes makes for
cool, unsympathetic distance, as evidenced in her nine-year-old response to the slums.
However, this quiet mode helps her gradually to reconnect with Olga, for it enables her to
balance and examine multiple layers of experience in long, complex lines that move surely,
if not rapidly, to the final, affirming image of Olga.
Beneath the (at first apparently
absolute)estrangement, the pet reveals an impulse to reach out to her sister, to
understand, and recover the bonds between them. It is an impulse based in implicit
acknowledgment of shared experience and love. Her desire for connection is most evident
when she evokes moments of intimacy, often rediscovered beneath the surfaces of the same
words, events, or scenes that estrange the sisters, indicating that their bond preceded,
and must finally bridge, the distance between them. Thus, Denise twice recalls Olga’s
loneliness, only to be reminded of their deep bond.
. . .you went walking
the year you were most alone.
. . . . . . . .
crossing the ploughlands (whose color I named murple,
a shade between mauve and brown that we loved
when I was a child and you
not much more than a child)
. . . . . . . .
How many books
you read in your silent lodgings that winter,
how the plovers transpierced your solitude out of doors with
their strange cries
I had flung my arms to in longing, once by your side
stumbling over the furrows–
(Sorrow Dance, pp. 58-59)
Recalling what they have shared, the poet first
emphasizes the similarity, not the difference, in their ages, and then, as she sees
herself flinging open her arms in longing, acknowledges a passionate desire akin to
Olga’s. Such glimpses of similarity contribute importantly to Denise’s new
understanding of Olga and to the reconciliation it makes possible.
The change in the poet’s view of Olga is
apparent in change sin her imagery. The flames of Olga’s passion fade, as the poet
comes to see clearly "that kind candle" in her sister’s heart; recognizing
that love was the source of Olga’s rage, Denise now wonders, with some awe,
"what kept compassion’s candle alight in you. . .?" (P. 60). Similarly, the
image of relentlessly flowing water becomes first "a sea/of love and pain," (p.
57) and finally the streams and brooks through which Denise sees Olga’s eyes and
fully recognizes her sister.
New motifs also reflect and contribute to
Denise’s changing view of Olga. The most important of these is music. Gradually, we
come to see Olga as a musician and lover of music. In the final poem, Denise recalls her
sister "savagely" playing "straight through all the Beethoven
sonatas," and realizes that Olga was playing to survive: "you were enduring in
the/falls and rapids of the music, the arpeggios range out, the rectory/trembled, our
parents seemed effaced" (p. 59-60). The poet is able to recognize the importance of
music to Olga here because she has earlier recalled a serener music which stills binds her
to Olga:
In a garden grene [sic] whenas I lay–
You set the words to a tune so plaintive
it plucks its way through my life as through a wood.
As through a wood, shadow and light between
birches,
gliding a moment in open glades, hidden by thickets of holly
your life winds in me.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 57)
The memory of this music leads directly to an
extended memory of shared childhood longings and secrets, in which the age difference
again dissolves; Olga’s song twines through this memory, too: she had imagines that
the sisters might lift a trapdoor in the ground and travel to "another country,"
where we would like without father or mother
and without longing for the upper world. The birds
sang sweet, O song, in the midst of the daye,
. . . . . . . .
and we entered silent mid-Essex churches on hot afternoons
and communed with the effigies of knights and their ladies
and their slender dogs asleep at their feet,
the stone so cold—
In youth
is pleasure, in youth is pleasure.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 58)
The sisters dream of freedom from adults, and of
romance. Olga, too–it is her story, we’re told–may have yearned to stay a
child. Yet Olga’s suffering, in childhood as later, runs as an undercurrent even of
this most peaceful poem. Music, recollected, then, restores and enlarges the intimacy of
which it was earlier an integral part.
Gradually, the poet’s view of Olga changes.
She recognizes Olga’s suffering more fully as she sees her sister as a child, both in
the dreamy passage just quoted, and in the painful passage that precedes her final vision:
"I think of your eyes in that photo, six years before I was born,/fear in them. What
did you do with your fear,/later?" (P. 60). Acknowledging Olga’s childhood,
Denise herself matures. Recalling Olga’s music, she finds another source of kinship
in art. Recognizing this bond between them, recreating Olga, and through her sister’s
influence eventually expanding the possibilities of her own poetry, Levertov the poet
indeed acts like Olga, the storyteller who attempted to recreate the world.
Levertov’s new understanding and sense of
kinship with Olga are confirmed in the final lines of the sequence. She recalls the past,
when her eyes "smarted in pain and anger" at the thought of Olga; at the end,
she says, "so many questions my eyes/smart to ask your eyes." (Pp. 59-60).
Finally, she returns to the imagery of the first poem, re-evoking Olga’s warm
sensuous darkness:
. . .your eyes, gold brown eyes,
the lashes short but the lids
arched as if carved out of olivewood, eyes with some vision
of festive goodness in back of their hard, or veiled, or shining,
unknowable gaze. . .(Levertov’s ellipsis)
(Sorrow Dance, p. 60)
By now the vision has gained the depth and
intimacy of adult understanding and love, which allow the speaker to acknowledge her own
limits, and her sister’s integrity, and to accept the fact that some questions will
never be answered.
Coming to terms with Olga, accepting and loving
her, is important to the poet in several ways. That this relationship was long weighted
with misunderstand and pain is evident in Levertov’s earlier, less direct, references
to it. In "Relative Figures Reappear" and "A May of the Western Part of the
County of Essex in England, she refers to Olga as frightening but dear. Two other poems,
"Song for a Dark Voice" and "A Window," evoke Olga’s spirit
through imagery similar to that of the "Olga Poems" and surround that spirit
with a mysterious attraction.
Another dimension of Olga’s importance,
transcending personal emotion (but growing from it), is evident in the place this sequence
takes in the center of The Sorrow Dance, where it links poems of Eros, which explore
sensuous experience, first to poems that emphasize vision, elaborating on the new capacity
for understanding achieved through reconciliation with Olga, and then, most significantly,
to poems of ardent political commitment. Levertov is known today for her commitment to the
anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. I believe that she owes the conviction that makes her
political beliefs integral to much of her writing to Olga and to her own effort to
understand the importance of her sister and their relationship. Before The Sorrow Dance,
her poetry does not generally reflect her political interests. That Olga has freed her to
speak out is clearly suggested in poems that follow the "Olga Poems." In "A
Note to Olga (1966), "the poet detects her sister’s presence at a protest march:
"Your high soprano/sings out from just/in back of me–." It seems to be Olga
who is lifted "limp and ardent" into the gaping paddywagon (Sorrow Dance, pp.
88-89). We can also see Olga’s influence in later books, most notably To Stay Alive,
and The Freeing of the Dust. Her influence is present both in Levertov’s political
topics and in her ability to sympathize with radical protesters, some of whom are surely
much more like Olga than like the poet herself.
Olga’s life is vindicated and honored in her
sister’s poems. Her passionate commitment to change contributes to Levertov’s
maturity and her poetic development. Olga’s pain, shared by Denise, gives depth to
the latter’s vision. Levertov acknowledges her debt by concluding The Sorrow Dance
with "The Ballad of My Father," a poem written by Olga shortly before her death.
Allowing Olga thus to speak for herself, she shares her book with her sister and confirms
the link between them.
But while Denise acknowledges that she has grown
through her new understanding of Olga, herself, and their relationship, important
differences remain, and Denise’s view of life is validated. Olga’s led her to
grief and death. Denise’s view, on the other hand, is echoed in the structure and
process of the "Olga" sequence itself. Instead of "flowing"
relentlessly, the poems, and with them the poet’s view of Olga, unfold. The movements
backward in time to a more intimate past, and even to the image of Olga’s frightened
face, can be thought of as the folding back of layers to reveal the essential core of
Olga’s character and the sisters’ bond. Levertov also insists on the differences
between them in the political poems of To Stay Alive: Olga has freed the poet to a fuller
knowledge of Eros, but her fuller understanding means she must diverge form Olga’s
path, as she does when she turns away from consuming anger to affirm the value of
struggling for life.
The final words of the "Olga Poems,"
then, are true both to Denise’s love for her sister and to her recognition that Olga
will always be inaccessible to her: that "unknowable gaze" is beautiful but
impenetrable. Levertov thus acknowledges the tension of the sisters’ bond, the
contrast between intimacy and estrangement, which is one of Adrienne Rich’s dominant
themes when she explores the same subject.
Ed. By A.H. McNaron The Sister Bond, A
Feminist View of a Timeless Connection. Copyright ? 1985 by Pergamon Press Inc. New
York. pp. 107-113.
Harry Marten
That the roots of responsibility to community run deep in the poet’s personal
experience, entwining private and public feelings, is evident in the moving "Olga
Poems" that Levertov writes in memorial to her much older sister Olga Levertoff, who
died at the age of fifty. Recalling the childhoods they spent together but never quite
shared because of differences in age and temperament, the poet recreates and speculates
upon the impulses, desires, anxieties, and beliefs of the complex person "who now
these two months long / is bones and tatters of flesh in earth." What "the
little sister" rejected or was intuitively moved by, but couldn’t possibly
understand, the adult poet now knows and recognizes as an important seedbed of her own
understanding. Levertov remembers the ways Olga "muttered into my childhood,"
sounding her "rage / and human shame" before poverty, her insistence on the
worth of change, her love of the musical words of hymns. She recognizes, too, what may be
some of the cost of such sensitivity, energy and commitment: "the years of
humiliation, / of paranoia . . . and near-starvation, losing / the love of those you
loved." Levertov ponders and pays homage to "compassion’s candle alight"
nonetheless in her sister.
The sequence begins vividly with a sensory recreation of a child’s vision, suggesting
in its intensity how important the older sister was to the younger, and yet how separate
and impenetrable she was. The reader can virtually feel the heat "By the
gas-fire" as Olga kneels "to undress"
scorching luxuriously, raking
her nails over olive sides, the red
waistband ring—
……………… I…………
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark-nippled . . .
The reader recognizes, too, how absorbed and apart the poet-child is, taking it all in
for a lifetime’s reference:
(And the little sister
beady-eyed in the bed—
or drowsy, was I? My head
a camera–) …
But the adult poet is less concerned here with the physical moment than with
comprehending the emotional tension and energy that shaped her sister and thereby affected
her own life. Quickly attention shifts from a camera view of frozen time to moments of
meditation and speculation, as Levertov, blending the child’s point of view and the
remembering adult’s more reasoned understanding, relates the physical to the emotional.
Signs of stress predominate in the portrait of a young woman who seems at once
forbiddingly old and vulnerably adolescent. They appear in "The high pitch of /
nagging insistence" of Olga’s voice; in the "lines / creased into raised
brows"; and in "the skin around the nails / nibbled sore." The teenager who
"wanted / to shout the world to its senses" who knew from the age of nine what
defined a "slum" was teased by her small sister reaching the same age,
"admiring / architectural probity, circa / eighteen-fifty." But the poet, grown
up and mixing memory with her own clear and strong adult social conscience, recognizes
that in her dark browed and mercurial sibling was a purity of caring difficult to live
with, but crucially valuable in its steady brightness: "Black one, black one, / there
was a white / candle in your heart."
Pondering the steps and missteps of Olga’s life in relation to her own values and
choices, Levertov conjures a vision of her sister’s restlessness turned fearfully against
itself. Half remembering and half creating moments of the past, Levertov recalls Olga’s
conviction that "everything flows," expressed as nervous mutterings while she
was "pacing the trampled grass" of childhood playgrounds. These were words, the
poet acknowledges, that "felt … alien" to the much quieter small child
"look[ing] up from [her] Littlest Bear’s cane armchair." Yet they were a source
of comfort and bonding as well:
… linked to words we loved
from the hymnbook—Time
like an ever-rolling stream / bears all its sons away–