Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich, while they might be considered opposites in some respects, share an appreciation of the sensuous, a recognition of the political nature of individual experience and of poetry, and the fact that each has written of her relationship with her sister, exploring movingly both the personal and the political importance of the relationship.
Levertov writes of the sister bond in a formal sequence; Rich, in poems that have appeared in several books over a period of years. Each examines a complex and changing bond, colored with rivalry and intimacy, loss and reaffirmation, shaped by forces inside each sister and outside both. They deal with similar dilemmas: each must recognize both her likeness to and difference from her sister. For each, the recognition of similarity and difference complicates a common double image, that of the sister as a mirror, or as "what I might have been."
Having confronted the difficulties of sisterhood, they suggest ways of moving toward relationships that may be both personally and politically sustaining. Understanding her sister and their relationship allows each poet to understand herself and to grow poetically and politically: Levertov becomes a more politically assertive writer, and Rich establishes a concrete bridge to relationships with other women. For both, then their poems about their sisters contribute to the development of their poetry. And the fact that, in spite of their differences, Levertov’s and Rich’s responses to this topic have much in common suggests the truth of their findings for other sisters.
In her "Olga Poems," Denise Levertov explores and recreates her relationship with her dead sister, Olga. The primary fact of this relationship, as it is initially described, is distance.
By the gas-fire kneeling
to undress,
scorching luxuriously, raking
her nails over olive sides, the red
waistband ring–
(And the little sister
beady-eyed in the bed–
or drowsy, was I? My head
a camera–)
Sixteen. Her breasts
round, round, and
dark, nippled–
(Sorrow Dance, p. 53)
Olga, at 16, was sensuously alive; Denise was separated from her by years and experience. The sisters’ present separation by death seems to confirm the earlier distance. The gap persists as the second poem describes Olga’s nagging voice and chewed nails, symptoms of her rage at the world, a rage her younger sister did not share:
What rage
and human shame swept you
when you were nine and saw
the Ley Street houses,
grasping their meaning as slum.
(Sorrow Dance, p. 54)
Denise, at nine, teased her sister about the slum, "admiring/architectural probity, circa/eighteen-fifty." Yet as poem ii ends, the adult Denise recognizes the paradox and contradiction at Olga’s center: "Black one, black one,/there was a white candle in your heart." "Paradox and contradiction, we will find, are characteristic of the sisters’ relationship and essential to the reconciliation that Denise achieves through these poems.
Recurrent images and motifs suggest Olga’s powerful character and the difficulties of the relationship. Images associated with fire indicate Olga’s passionate anger, desire, and nonconformity. After Olga has cast off her family and disappeared, Denise dreams of her "haggard and rouged/lit by the flare/from an eel– or cockle-stand on a slum street" (p. 56). When she lies dying, her sister remarks that Olga’s hatreds, her "disasters bred of love," and all history have "burned out, down/to the sick bone" (p. 57). The color black also recurs, suggesting the anguish of this black-haired, olive-skinned sister. Olga’s desperate fury seems compelled by a vision expressed in her compulsively repeated "Everything flows" and in the image of "the rolling dark oncoming river" whose course she struggles to change: "pressing on/to manipulate lives to disaster. . .To change,/to change the course of the river!" (P. 55). The gradual transformation of these images, as the sequence develops, indicates the transformation of Denise’s vision of Olga and their relationship.
The intensity of Denise’s feelings and of her desire for reconciliation is evident in her tendency to repeat key words and phrases—Olga is "Ridden, ridden," or "Black one, black one"—and most powerfully in the poem immediately preceding the "Olga" sequence in The Sorrow Dance, "A Lamentation" (p. 52):
Grief, have I denied thee?
Grief, I have denied thee.
That robe or tunic, black gauze
over black and silver my sister wore
to dance Sorrow, hung so long
in my closet. I never tried it on.
. . . . . . . .
Grief,
have I denied thee? Denied thee.
But her grief and desire are mixed with uncertainty: fire burns, Olga’s efforts to stem the flow are worse than useless, and she betrays her "blackness" when she dyes her hair blond. The younger sister’s ambivalence is evident, too, as she vacillates between speaking to Olga and describing her in the third person, before she finally commits herself to sustained direct 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.