Describe the visual imagery of the poem "A Time Past" by Denise Levertov.

Denise Levertov's poem, "A Time Past" uses visual imagery
to conjure up moments from the past.

The first bit of
visual imagery is found in the mention of the steps:

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The old wooden steps to the front
door...

These words conjure
an image of wooden steps that are never quite clean, even when swept, but are worn soft
by age and use, though they are still capable in the speaker's memory to leave slivers
behind.

Another visual image presents a beautiful morning,
awash in sunlight, early and cold enough that the dew is almost
frost.

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...(emerging into golden day— the dew almost
frost)...

Another visual
image is the description of the old steps now; there may be foreshadowing in this
statement that the steps are gone, dead:

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...those wooden steps are gone now,
decayed...

And
the description of the new steps conveys not only that the old has been replaced, but
replaced by strong, cold steps—as if they have beauty, but no
soul:

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...replaced with granite, / hard, gray, and
handsome...

The woman refers
once more to that enchanted moment when "he" came downstairs, the memories of his youth,
his return of her exclamation of love ringing out in the
silence:

Yet
that one instant, / your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, 'I love you too,' / the quiet
broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves / spinning in silence down without / any
breeze to blow them.

The
memory of that moment wraps around the speaker, "twining" itself like a clinging vine,
attaching itself in her mind to those old steps, permanently a part of that moment;
however the moment is gone, and perhaps the visual imagery that ends the poem parallels
the deterioration of the relationship as well as the
steps:

Yet
that one instant...is what twines itself / in my head and body across those slabs of
wood / that were warm, ancient, and now / wait somewhere to be
burnt.