Dreams have always been a source of inspiration for poets, but not all poems inspired by dreams are discernable as such. “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” (p. 25) is such a poem. This poem describes a girl who leans from a window, names marzipan and roses, and dances in the garden. Her naming of these objects gives them life and meaning, taste and fragrance, as if she had touched them with a magic wand. The poem’s power lies in its leisurely exposure of a moment in time. In order to fully appreciate a moment such as the one described in “Girlhood,” the reader must make a conscious effort to slow down and experience the poem frame by frame, absorbing each item as it is named: the cedar tree, the star-cake, the moon islands. Deep in a poem, long spaces connect moments of perception that have nothing to do with time as measured in the conventional way.

The poem’s power lies in its leisurely exposure of a moment in time. In order to fully appreciate a moment such as the one described in ‘Girlhood,’ the reader must make a conscious effort to slow down and experience the poem frame by frame…

In Levertov’s essay, “Interweavings: Reflections on the Role of Dream in the Making of Poems,”^[1] she explains that the poem describes a dream she had about Jane Harrison’s childhood. Levertov critiques the poem, writing that “this is a great danger of dream poems: that they remain subjective, private, inaccessible without the author’s gloss” (p. 32). As a reader, I had no idea that “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” derived from a dream, but I am not sure that such knowledge would have enhanced or detracted from my experience of the poem. Levertov distinguishes between poems that are derived from dreams and poems that just seem that way, and states “When a poem ‘feels like a dream’ it does so by the virtue of the clearness of its terms (however irrational they may be)” (p. 35). “With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” is such a poem: it operates within a peculiar dream-logic that fits it completely, but it is not vague and dream-like. From the first stanza, the poem makes its intentions clear:

This first stanza asks us to suspend our disbelief and to accompany the poet on a journey that she promises will be unlike any other. Levertov does not write “If we had eyes at the back of our heads;” she simply asserts that for the space of this poem, we have them, and that our purpose is to use them to see things from this viewpoint. The poem guides us, rather firmly, from the mountain to the doors and the knitter whose task is to balance the imperfections the architect sees:

Dreams make sense only within their own framework; “With Eyes” is similarly logical as a whole and completely separate experience. “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” describes rather than instructs, and although my understanding of the poem benefited from Levertov’s gloss, it is not too private for me to derive a meaning from. The star-cake, moon islands, and roses of marzipan allow us a way into her dream, made accessible with this poem. The playful images appealed to the child I once was; as an adult, I understand the poem’s message of moving outward, from smaller to larger and larger planes, as the garden “dissolved its boundaries.” “At a window — / so much is easy to see” (p. 25) — with or without the knowledge that a dream was the source of this poem, the reader is able to enter a dream-like state aided by the poem’s imagery, and invent for herself or himself what the poet sees from the window. The possibilities ripple through our imaginations.

“With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads” and “Girlhood of Jane Harrison” opened the doors of poetry for me and became the foundation of a lifelong practice. Barely able, as a child, to discern the meaning in Denise Levertov’s poems, I nevertheless plumbed them for all the mystery I could find. I still read her regularly, and I still rely on the lessons I once learned through reading her poetry. To paraphrase Eavan Boland, I found poems I can grow old in. I still have the original book, the one I found in a bookshelf at home when I was a child, published by New Directions in 1959. I had to learn patience in order to read Levertov, and that lesson has stayed with me as an adult, eager to discover the meaning in poetry that might take a very long time to figure out.