The Secret

The short poem straddles several genres. As a lyric, it conveys the speaker’s emotions about the girls and the secret they uncovered in a poem. The poem is also didactic, containing a lesson for readers—that there is a “secret of life” (Line 2) that appears “a thousand times” (Line 25) in different lived experiences and lines of poetry. Finally, by never revealing what the secret is, or even what poem the girls found it in, “The Secret” becomes a riddle: Both the speaker and the reader are privy to an unsolved mystery. Combining the riddle and didactic genres is contradictory; suggesting that the secret of life is a puzzle that each person has to solve on their own.

The speaker is identified not by name or gender, but by occupation—as the poet who wrote the poem the girls read. Because of this, it would be reasonable to assume that the “I” that appears in Lines 5, 20, and 22 refers to Levertov herself. However, this biographical link works against the poem’s oblique tone—leaving the speaker vague is more fitting for the mystery at its center.

The poem starts with a straightforward image: Two girls are huddled together, reading a book. However, almost immediately, while the diction remains blunt, the atmosphere turns enigmatic, as the girls find “the secret of life” (Line 2). The juxtaposition between the youth and naiveté implied in the word “girls” is at odds with the wisdom and depth of this discovery “in a sudden line of / poetry” (Lines 3-4).

Stanza 2 briefly returns to the mundane world, as the speaker admits authorship of the girls’ poem, proud because the work is clearly incredibly impactful, but humble because only the girls have been able to draw this level of meaning from it: “I who don’t know the / secret wrote / the line” (Lines 5-7). The use of enjambment—lines that break in the middle of a thought instead of at a grammatical pause—add to the speaker’s bewilderment. To grasp the jarring line breaks, the reader must constantly reorient the grammatical unit.

The introduction of a new character—the important “third person” (Line 9)—increases rather than resolves the mystery. This nameless mediator connects the speaker and the two girls, who otherwise have no way of communicating—the third person knows both the speaker and girls first-hand and can relay their experiences to the other. However, the third person is a flawed medium: While the third person tells the speaker-poet about the girls’ discovery of meaning, the third person doesn’t reveal the identity of the two girls, which poem contained the secret, or “what it was / not even / what line it was” (Lines 11-13). Thus, the relationships between the third person and the two girls, as well as the third person and the speaker, remain unclear. The peevish tone of Line 11 through Line 13 makes the speaker sound annoyed at the third person’s unreliable and incomplete information. It’s possible that the third person doesn’t know the secret or the line—perhaps the two girls kept the secret to themselves.

Despite an absence of firsthand knowledge, the speaker confidently predicts the result of the girls’ discovery:

No doubt

by now, more than a week

later, they have forgotten

the secret (Lines 13-16).

The source of the speaker’s confidence is unclear, though the phrase “no doubt” implies speculation rather than real reporting of events: The speaker is really only guessing at the state of the girls’ memories. To boost a sense of authority, the speaker relies on temporal precision, measuring time with the phrases “by now” and “more than a week later.” The idea is to buttress the conjecture with extraneous, but factual details.

Undeterred by the unsatisfying connection created by the third person, the speaker-poet projects warm fondness on the girls, gratified by their interest:

I love them

for finding what

I can’t find

And for loving me

for the line I wrote (Lines 18-22).

The repetition of the word “love” creates a bond between the speaker and the girls; the lack of in-person relationship doesn’t foreclose the powerful emotion. The poem suggests that love doesn’t need specific or full identification to flourish. The speaker-poet is imagining that the poem has had a profound effect on the girls—so much so that they now love the speaker “for the line I wrote” (Line 22). We have no evidence that this is the case, but the poem argues that poets must believe this of their readers in order to find meaning and joy in the work of writing.

Having established this empathetic connection with the girls, the speaker continues speculating about how finding the secret will play out from now on. Rather than attributing importance to the line where the secret lay, the speaker instead prioritizes the repeated process of discovery, claiming that the girls will forget the secret “a thousand times” (Line 25) before they “discover it again” (Line 27) in different “lines” (Line 28) and “happenings (Line 30). The “forgetting” (Line 23) and subsequent search and rediscovery are the key; the girls don’t have exclusive access to the secret—it defies confinement, existing in a plethora of texts, experiences, and places.

The speaker ends this speculative reverie on a downcast note, however: The girls are to be commended, the speaker decides, for “assuming there is / such a secret” (Lines 33-34). The word “assuming” suggests that the speaker may not believe in the existence of this secret meaning. Either the speaker’s pessimism is right, and there actually is no puzzle or mystery to uncover in poetry or in lived experience, or the speaker lacks access to the same font of wisdom that will prompt the girls to find the secret of life over and over throughout their lives.