The Secret

In “The Secret,” two girls find the elusive meaning of life in a line of poetry. The girls soon forget the secret and the meaning, but this doesn’t matter—what matters is that the girls believe that poetry and other resonant phenomena contain such a secret at all. Because of this, the girls will encounter the secret in various other life moments and lines of poetry. By highlighting the process of search and discovery, and downplaying the actual secret by never revealing it, the poem subverts the literary trope of understanding the meaning of life, which typically prioritizes the meaning itself and the need to internalize it permanently.

Literary works often revolve around a writer spelling out the meaning of life to readers. This is a feature of moral tales such as Aesop’s Fables or biblical parables, which posit that life’s meaning is found in one’s relationships with others and with the divine. It is also a feature of classic poems like “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), by the English Romantic poet John Keats. Keats famously names knowing beauty and truth as key to grasping life’s larger meaning. While these examples restrict and detail the meaning of life, creating a didactic experience for readers, Levertov keeps the meaning open. In her poem, the secret is agile but not so hard to find, as the girls can expect to find it “a thousand times” (Line 25) in other poems and situations. Lacking a writer’s voice of authority, the girls in “The Secret” are instead casual, unfussy readers: They saw the poem, got the secret, forgot it “a week / later” (Lines 14-15), and will find it many times again in the future. Levertov points out that this process of discovery, loss, and rediscovery is more important than a crystallized meaning of life handed down by a poet. Levertov’s girls are mobile and free, suggesting that the best route to the meaning of life is staying receptive, as meaning can appear in countless ways.