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.