I'm continuing to transcribe my journal of visits to Denise Levertov circa 1975-76. The following is undated from sometime in fall '75:
"I looked in on 4 Glover Circle today as D. had asked me to do while she is out of town on a brief teaching gig. All was well, but I noticed something familiar was missing from her study. I couldn't at first recall what it was though. On the bookstand that sits just inside the doorway, I realized that there was an empty place next to the framed photo of Doc Williams, seated in an armchair in some living room, perhaps his own, dressed in a white shirt, vest and tie. Everything else was in order. The portraits of Keats on top of the adjacent roll-top desk, the woodblock print in blue ink of William Morris's bearded face thumb-tacked to the wall just above the shelf.... Then I remembered there was a second photo of W.C. Williams, the same sized, framed. In the first one, W.C.W. is seated, staring back at the camera, his hands clapped together in applause or for emphasis in conversations. The missing one is a picture of Doc Williams in shirt-sleaves, rounding the corner of a shrub, striding across the manicured lawn of some college campus, the college chapel just behind him and to the left. "That photo was taken after he had had his first stroke," Denise said over my shoulder the first time I viewed it. "And just look at the vitality still in his step!" She had added, "It's that kind of energy that allowed him to practice two very demanding professions. " I wonder why she took it down from the shelf.
