Of late, the Denise Levertov’s poem, “The Tide,” has been coming to me as I try to process the most recent bombardment of the bad. I’m a Calvinist with a degree in history, so I understand that such has it ever been. And yet….
I’ve included the poem below for your own meditation. But a few comments: I particularly appreciate Levertov’s open searching for the Giver–and the utterly convicting lines of the second stanza, which reminds us of being too quick to assign anything to God. To be honest, stanza 2 echoes in my mind whenever I start hearing blithe talk about God’s will. How confidently indeed.
In the succeeding stanzas, Levertov begins to search for images of faith–but these are too facile. Abstract and disconnected. And their pretty vacuousness (they remind me a little of Thomas Kinkade paintings) doesn’t help her find the One to whom she wishes to give her gratitude. Even more, she realizes that she hasn’t even begun the search in earnest.
The poem’s final stanza provides at least a provisional suggestion: faith requires action, not abstraction. The “ebb and flow” of trying to live out our faith, instead of becoming paralyzed. And the good news is that the action needn’t be grand; it’s all the quotidian stuff: clean the beach, write a poem, let the ocean do its work. Thus, the “emptiness” that begins the poem turns out to be not God’s absence, but the space of something too great to be contained. In witnessing the magnitude of this power, Levertov suggests, we are restored to our proper position on the beach–not speaking for God, but responding with gratitude for the God who is beyond all sound bites and cliches.
The Tide
Where is the Giver to whom my gratitude
rose? In this emptiness
there seems no Presence.
*
How confidently the desires
of God are spoken of!
Perhaps God wants
something quite different.
Or nothing, nothing at all.
*
Blue smoke from small
peaceable hearths ascending
without resistance in luminous
evening air.
Or eager mornings—waking
as if to a song’s call.
Easily I can conjure
a myriad images
of faith.
Remote. They pass
as I turn a page.
*
Outlying houses, and the train’s rhythm
slows, there’s a signal box,
people are taking their luggage
down from the racks.
Then you wake and discover
you have not left
to begin the journey.
*
Faith’s a tide, it seems, ebbs and flows responsive
to action and inaction.
Remain in stasis, blown sand
stings your face, anemones
shrivel in rock pools no wave renews.
Clean the littered beach, clear
the lines of a forming poem,
the waters flood inward.
Dull stones again fulfill
their glowing destinies, and emptiness
is a cup, and holds
the ocean.
