The Secret

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1964

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Profound Wisdom

The meaning of life, the mystery of life, and the urgency of the moment center on the poem within the poem representing profound meaning. What propels Levertov’s poem is the girls reading a poem and discovering a line that reveals “the secret of life” (Line 2). The poem is a medium for wisdom. Yet the wisdom isn’t legible. The girls don’t reveal the line containing the secret or the secret. The knowledge remains a puzzle and a mystery. As the speaker doesn’t—or can’t—disclose specifics, the symbolism advances the trope that poetry’s meaning is often too difficult to decipher—it’s a code that requires an academic or an expert.

The 20th-century poet Ted Kooser addresses the alleged complexity of poetry. Addressing Modernism and other proceeding forms of ostensibly intricate poetry movements, Kooser says, “Modernism did its best to exclude a lot of readers by its difficulty, its elitism” (Kooser, Ted. “A Conversation with Ted Kooser.” Kenyon Review, 2008). In “Selecting a Reader” (1980), Kooser combats the “elitism” when his speaker chooses a regular, somewhat flippant woman as the ideal reader. Similar to Kooser, Levertov subverts the loftiness of poetry through the two girls. Neither academics nor experts, the girls obtain the secret, indicating that a person doesn’t need special qualifications to comprehend a poem.

Levertov further subverts the profundity by having the girls forget it “more than a week / later” (Lines 13-14). The wisdom doesn’t stick with the girls, suggesting the line isn’t so brilliant. Conversely, what makes the line acute is its relevance to other poems and the world. The poet in the poem doesn’t have a monopoly over profound meaning, and neither does poetry. The girls will come across the secret in other lines and life experiences. Poetry’s wisdom comes from its relationship to other poems and the greater world. In Levertov’s poem, poetry is inclusive.

Exploration

The speaker’s description of the girls locating the secret the first time, and the projection that they will continue to rediscover it throughout their lives points to the importance of exploration in the poem. The motif is reinforced in several ways: First, they find the secret in a line of poem that the speaker-poet cannot identify—a situation that marks poetry as a code that requires solving and re-solving. At the same time, as the poet “can’t find” (Line 20) the same meaning that the girls have stumbled onto, Levertov subverts the speaker-poet’s writerly authority. The power dynamics shift as the young girls understand something that eludes the established poet, cracking a puzzle that gives them access to the “secret of life” (Line 2). Uncovering this in a “sudden line of / poetry” (Lines 3-4) rewards the girls’ exploration of literature; their willingness to engage with unfamiliar work marks them as game adventurers, possibly because of their young age and optimism about the presence of such secrets in the first place.

On the other hand, neither the third person nor the speaker can unravel the mystery of the secret; moreover, the speaker-poet is wistful about the girls’ ability to detect such meaning in the poem they encountered. While the speaker-poet is no longer sure such secrets exist, the girls are to be praised for “assuming there is such a secret” (Lines 33-34). The girls, meanwhile, have a lifetime of exploring ahead of them. After they identify the secret, they forget it, but they will “discover it again” (Line 27) in other works of literature and in their everyday lives as well.

Subverting Age and Gender Norms

The poem’s central characters are girls whose active pursuit of knowledge and wisdom positions them at the top of the gender and age hierarchy. As they explore poetry, locate the meaning of life in it, forgetting this meaning, and then rediscovering it again in many different ways, the girls take on the intellectual rigor and prowess more often attributed to adults and to men.

Levertov’s poem, by specifically identifying her protagonists as “girls”—while the poem’s other characters remain age- and gender-less—argues that their youth and girlhood are inherently positive qualities that allow them access to confronting life’s mysteries and embracing the urgency of the moment. The girls don’t need the speaker-poet or the third person to explain the meaning of life; rather, they grasped it on their own as soon as they read the poetic line that contained it. This easy achievement prompts the speaker’s admiration and respect; as does the fact that the girls don’t share their newfound knowledge with the third person, the speaker, or the reader. Disinclined to replicate the top-down distribution of knowledge, the girls don’t share the secret because they want to empower the reader—whatever their age or gender—to find it independently.