“I love them for finding what I can’t find…”
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– Denise Levertov
“What a child needs, what we all need, is to find some other people who have imagined life along lines that make sense to us,” wrote Ursula le Guin in her inspiring treatise on the importance of imagination and literature to young readers. First moments of insight through reading are among the most magical, an experience that prompted Denise Levertov to this poem, The Secret. Levertov writes about the experience of unintentionally authoring a line that reveals something profound to a reader, something which remains a mystery to the author herself. She also acknowledges that the forgetting of this revelation is just as important as its discovery, as it allows us to experience the joy of new insight, and to hold the faith that there is meaning to be discovered again and again over the course of our lives.
The Secret
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
From: O Taste and See: New Poems