'A Joy Untainted By Guilt'

Ain't it funny how stuff magically shows up at just the right time or right when we need it?! I had not long started writing about this new chapter that seems to be beginning for me, when I came across this, searching for poems to read in a voice class I'm taking. It spoke to me in so many ways: the deliciousness of autonomy and of choice, my very real experience of facing middle age when it feels impossible I could be there, and an optimism for a self-determined future, joyful, wise and jolly.
Do I see myself as alone? Perhaps not always, but I am currently enjoying my solitude: my book-piled bed, my midnight suppers. I too have my fears... "but not about loneliness."

A Woman Alone
by Denise Levertov
​
When she cannot be sure
which of two lovers it was with whom she felt
this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery
streaking from head to heels, the way the white
flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside
seen from a car across a valley, the car
changing gear, skirting a precipice,
climbing…
When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie
talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter
with friends, without worrying
that it’s late, dinner at midnight, her time
spent without counting the change…
When half her bed is covered with books
and no one is kept awake by the reading light
and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon…
Then
self-pity dries up, a joy
untainted by guilt lifts her.
She has fears, but not about loneliness;
fears about how to deal with the aging
of her body—how to deal
with photographs and the mirror. She feels
so much younger and more beautiful
than the looks. At her happiest
—or even in the midst of
some less than joyful hour, sweating
patiently through a heatwave in the city
or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,
toneless, the sound of fatigue--
a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe
in her future as an old woman, a wanderer
seamed and brown,
little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,
watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,
without being watched; not grim nor sad,
an old winedrinking woman, who knows
the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself…
She knows it can’t be:
that’s Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from The Water Babies,
no one can walk the world any more,
a world of fumes and decibels.
But she thinks maybe
she could get to be tough and wise, some way,
anyway. Now at least
she is past the time of mourning,
now she can say without shame or deceit,
O blessed Solitude.
​

​Denise Levertov
(born October 24, 1923, Ilford,  England —died December 20, 1997, Seattle, Washington, U.S.), English-born American poet, essayist, and political activist who wrote deceptively matter-of-fact verse on both personal and political themes.

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