The Secret

Levertov uses free verse, eschewing rhyme, meter, and standard form. Nevertheless, the poem is organized: It is composed of nine quatrains (stanzas with four lines), a structure that underscores its content. When the girls discover the secret in a “sudden line of / poetry” (Lines 3-4), the lines break in ways that suggests the location of the secret. However, when the girls “have forgotten / the secret” (Lines 15-16), but they’ll discover it again “a thousand times” (Line 25), the structure builds tension by disseminating the possibility of the secret into many different lines. The poem remains orderly, but the secret no longer exists in a single tidy space.

Within the quatrains, Levertov mimics the messiness of the secret through enjambment, or breaking lines before a natural grammatical pause. Just as the secret suddenly appears in lines of poems and life moments, so do the lines of “The Secret” suddenly end. The enjambments link to Levertov’s concept of “organic poetry,” where “the metric movement, the measure, is the direct expression of the movement of perception” (Levertov, Denise. “Some Notes on Organic Form.