Denise Levertov

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For this week’s poem I have chosen “The Secret” by Denise Levertov. I found this poem extremely confusing at first, but after re-reading it a couple times and pondering it a while I started to understand it better. I think the poem is about how people can interpret poems in different ways. For me, it tells a story of two girls reading a poem by an author (the narrator) and then finding their own special meaning in the poem. They tell the author that they have discovered the ‘secret of life’ in the poem ( what the poem means.) But the author (narrator) doesn’t see the poem the way the girls do. Even though the author created the poem she ‘don’t know the, secret wrote, the line.’ The girls found a meaning in the poem that the author did not…show more content…
I enjoyed the last stanza of the poem: ‘assuming there is, such a secret, yes, for that, most of all.’ I think that the author is finishing the poem by stating that there are ‘secrets’ in poems, and all of us can interpret the ‘secrets’ that poems have differently. I found the constant use of metaphoric meanings and the lack of rhyme scheme in “The Secret” confusing and distasteful. But after reflecting over the poem I find the meaning that I have discovered in it to be very true, a poem can have different meanings for whoever reads it. This is a very genuine statement when studying literature, poetry especially. For example, for this poem, “The Secret” by Denise Levertov, I found that the poem means this: that poem can be interpreted in different ways, even if the author didn’t intend for it to be interpreted in that way, but someone else in the class might feel that the poem means entirely something else, they might feel it’s about two girls learning about life, or about the secrets of love, or anything

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