or does this fire carve me
for its use?
Just as there are certain events in actual life that are so charged with the information of a content that is to be realized in the maturation of the soul or form of the total lifetime, and as there are certain dreams that flood our active consciousness with the forms of unconscious, as yet unborn, facts of our identity, so, for the poet, there are poems that are prophetic of a poetry that is to be realized only in the fullness of the poet’s life, as for H.D. this early poem stands as a foreknowledge, a foreacknowledgment, of the major task she is to undertake in poetry. Ion, her version of Euripides’ drama, twenty years later, will mark the re-entry of the forces that for a moment she had seen at work toward fulfillment beyond the psyche in the advent of creative form in “Pygmalion”—of light, of heat, of fire, of stone and god. In the poetry of H.D.’s major phase, particularly in Helen in Egypt, the sense increases that as the artist works to achieve form he finds himself the creature of the form he thought at first to achieve. The role of the poet, his craft, is to seek out the design in the carpet, to come to know and then to acknowledge his identity in the terms of a poetry he but belongs to. The fire is indeed to carve the poet for its use.
•
As we come into the fullness of our sense of a life work, it is as if we were recovering or rescuing the import of what had always been there. We make good our earliest readings, make real what even we failed to see present at the time, transforming the events of our earlier life in a process of realizing what our work and life comes to mean. Creating meaning we create work and life, and, in turn, for meaning is the matter of the increment of human experience which we come to recognize in the language, we unite our individuality with a vision of its communal identity.
Over thirty years, my sense of that first reading of “Heat” has grown along lines of recognition and discovery of affinities to inform my return to those lines. Unconscious of the content that made for that imprint and awakened in me the sense of a self-revelation or life-revelation in the pursuit of Poetry, I was conscious only of my excitement in the inspiration—the new breath in language—and of a vocation. Whatever my abilities, it was here that I had been called to work. Beyond that, I had no more information than the uninformed account of what Imagism was as it was taught in literature classes of the late nineteen-thirties, where I came to learn that Amy Lowell’s “Patterns,” Pound’s “Metro,” Flint’s “Swan,” Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” and this poem “Heat” of H.D.’s were examples of Imagism. Their titles come in a list as if learned by rote. They had become set in the textbooks and classrooms of the late nineteen-thirties from the anthologies and arguments of the Imagist period itself. In the literary establishment Eliot had won the day—he had, indeed, designed that literary establishment in his essays; and H.D., along with Lawrence and even Pound (for Eliot had dismissed from serious consideration the “Religio” and the later Confucian conversion), belonged with those who had departed from what reasonable men consider of concern and had lusted after strange gods. Eliot had the charge of bringing his own poetic imagination into the circumscription of a Christian orthodoxy; but even in literary ranks where Eliot’s own god was considered strange, Imagism was dismissed as if it were a false religion. The Imagist fallacy was not an inherent weakness but a danger. In textbooks on poetry, the schoolmasters of the rationalist orthodoxy strove to establish Imagism as an aberration, a kind of insanity of the poem, in which imagery, which properly was a means in the poet’s presentation of his picture, became an end, as if image carried a meaning in itself.
There is a crucial difference between the doctrine of the Image where Poetry itself is taken to be a primary ground of experience and meaning in life, and the image which is taken as a fashion in the literary world. With H.D.’s “Heat” or with Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” I cannot separate the poem from its operation as prophecy or prayer in the shaping of my own life, the efficacy of the poem to awaken depths in me. The key lies in a rhetoric which is magic in its intent and not literary. This is its heresy.
Pound had presented his Imagist manifesto as an attack on rhetoric. He had sought a cure of tongues in the discipline of the eye, some restraint that would keep words grounded in meaning. The pomp of Milton or the sensual indulgences of Swinburne had led men to take effect and enthusiasm as in themselves poetic—the more effect, the more enthusiasm, the more poetic. There had been an inflation of language. Protesting against the “prolix” and “verbose,” against words “shoveled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound,” against “decorative vocabulary,” Pound’s insistence that there be “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” was the expression in poetics not only of a modern aesthetic demand for the functional but also of a demand that was moral and economic. If we think of Pound’s later concern for a monetary credit that is grounded in an actual productive order, “the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep,” and his outrage at the great swindling of confidence represented by usury, commodity speculation, money changing, and inflation, we find a basic concern for the good credit of things. Both words and money are currencies that must be grounded in the substance of a credibility if they be virtuous. Abstraction from the actual guarantee of experience meant manipulation of the public trust, as, in the United States, demagogues had long established by their misuses of language the common sense that what was “rhetorical” was for effect only, a persuading with words that were not truly meant, empty or worse, a hiding of the real meaning in order to make a sell.
In Guide to Kulchur, in 1938, relating his own Cantos to the quartets of Bartók, Pound saw in these works “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.” The Cantos, designed, as we see them, to bear the imprint of Pound’s experience of man’s history, contain as their condition and express the troubled spirit of our times as no other work in poetry does. It is his impersonating genius that, even where he presents flashes of eternal mind—veritas, claritas, hilaritas—they do not appear as a sublimation of the poem but remain involved, by defect, in the agony of the contemporary. A profound creative urge—“So-shu also, / using the long moon for a churn-stick”—churns in the sea of Pound’s spirit everywhere, even as it churns in the sea of our own history. We have our moment of truth just where contention will not allow our reason to rest undisturbed. The figure we seek is revealed in fragments in the path of a moon that troubles the waters in which the path of its light is reflected. It is part of the polemics of his time that is also ours that Pound juxtaposes his insight of the good and his prejudice of the bad. We are lost if we take his uses as having an authority other than the truth of how the world is felt and seen by the poet if he keep alive in him the defects inherent in a record of struggle. We, as readers, must enter the struggle and contend with the drama of defects. When Pound writes “Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation as compared with Milton’s rhetoric,” all is not claritas. In the contention, our sense of the good of definiteness and of Dante is to be the greater; but he means also that our sense of the good of rhetoric and of Milton is to be the less. Where Pound uses the popular pejorative demeaning of the word “rhetoric,” voiding its base in the likeness between the flow of speech and the flow of a river, he troubles the currents of meaning. Working with the debased currency of the word, he forces us to search out for ourselves the good credit of the word in man’s experience.
Hretor (τωρ, orator) comes from the Greek verb hreo (ω, to say) that had, if not a root in the strict etymological sense, the association of a pun, in common with the verb hreo (ω, to flow). The flow of speech was for the Greeks, as for us, an expression that could refer to words running glibly off the tongue being like a babbling brook, and likewise to the elemental power of fluency in saying. The poet must be fluent in speech. There must be currents of meaning as well as particularities of meaning. Speech was a river. The Greek lexicon of Lidde
ll & Scott tells us that “hoi hreontes was a nickname for the Heraclitean philosophers who held that all things were in a constant state of flux.” The mistrust that men had of speech was their mistrust of rivers that swept men along, that persuaded.
Pound was a man of inner conflicts. At once to convey a complex of emotions and to perfect an art. So too, his persuasion was against persuasion. It is characteristic of Pound’s nature in saying, of his river of speech, a currency he has in the common sense where it is most disturbed and disturbing, that words that come up in his contentions—“abstraction,” “rhetoric,” “jew,” or “shit,”—appear deprived of their good sense. “Rhetoric” became a term of derogation in his criticism, just as in The Cantos his great river of voices began, sweeping all conflicts up into the persuasion of its Heracleitean flux, having mastery through its triumphant rhetoric. The “one Image in a lifetime,” defined “in an instant of time,” in the life-flow of time is no longer discrete and unique but leads to and inherits depths from other times and places. In each instant of time, the tide of its river impended.
Imagist poems are charged with the drama of this arrest of a time that is like the force of a powerful current in arrest. In the suspended tension of H.D.’s poem “Garden,” there is the threat of movement. So too, in Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” which had appeared in Pound’s anthology Des Imagistes, the intellectual and emotional complex does not exist in an instant of time, in a flash of the essential reality, but it is charged with the portent of associations to come. Say that Joyce presents the waves of the sea, made the more vivid because he sees them as the horses and men of an army—these horsemen of the surf are an old Celtic idea—and that, in the close, his cry of despair and loneliness conveys the retreat of the wave. It still remains that what the poem presents leads us as readers on to something that the poem “says” beyond the image. Joyce is also telling us he hears (and everything we know of his genius in the story The Dead or in Ulysses or in the closing pages of Finnegans Wake verifies this sense of his language) the armies of the dead and the unborn at the shores of consciousness, swarming invasions from a sleeping reservoir that press upon Joyce’s waking mind, as all things of the waking world press upon his sleeping mind. What appears, whatever we see there, answers the call of his declaration of listening: “I hear. . . . ” The beginning of the saying reaches out from the proposition of what it says, and hearing rushes in to illustrate the proposition. The speaker, speaking of his hearing, hears; the hearer sees. Clairaudient to the voice of the poem and then beyond, Joyce becomes clairvoyant. It is all in the medium of saying: second-speech begins; the second-hearing or second-sight comes to meet it.
This complex does not exist in an instant of time but in a language or history out of an increment of times. Where these hosts are also (and all that we remember of what was about to happen in that year 1914 fulfills the prophecy) intimations of the actual armies of the First World War. “I hear an army charging upon the land” is not only an image of the sea breakers but an omen of war, ready to take on reverberations from history, fitting, preparing as it does, our own immediate knowledge of how a world that is now all a sea of armies grew. Place Joyce’s poem alongside of Arnold’s “Dover Beach” or Hardy’s “Channel Firing,” and its rhetoric rings out as of the same order.
It was the rhetoric too, the undercurrent of her speech, that gave meaning to H.D.’s poem. “O wind, rend open the heat—” if we respond in the mode of its address, persuades us to a need in our own being to break the perfection of the instant and restore the disturbing flow of time.
In Pound’s “Metro,” the immediate presentation may be enough, the interchange or correspondence of blossoms wet pressed to a black bough with faces in a crowded subway station. We may grasp the sense in being struck by the likeness. “The proper and perfect symbol is the natural object,” Pound writes in the Credo of his essay “A Retrospect”: “so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.” If we ask further, what does the image mean? what are these faces upon what “bough”? why “apparitions”? if we grant that the immediate image is a sense of the poem and yet, following the lead of Pound’s italicizing the indefinite article, we search beyond for an other sense of the poem, are we reading more into the poem than there is there?
In H.D.’s poem “Heat,” the images presented become propositions of a language that spoke of something hidden from me in hearing the poem, an ideogram I could not read yet. Everything that was felt was clearly rendered; what was felt was that something more impended. Not that I knew more than was there but that there was more there than I knew. We, the poet and those of us readers who have the commitment, must, like the knight who would heal the wound of the Fisher King and revive the Waste Land, ask the meaning of “fruit that cannot fall,” of “thickness of air,” of “heat,” and that meaning has only one place in which to gather—our life experience. We must discover correspondences and come in reading the poem to read our own lives.
It may be a sufficient issue of “Metro” or of Flint’s “Swan” to have read the image in the terms of its first instance, to have seen vividly the very clustered faces that are also the crowded blossoms or the swan passing into the dark of an archway. But now, turning back to the poem, I see that Flint would add “into the black depth of my sorrow.” Does it mar the image? “Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim lands of peace’,” Pound had instructed the would-be imagist: “It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.”
We may do well enough with “Patterns” to follow the Lady in impersonation and see the scene of the garden with its too-planned patterns as we go, as if it were a sequence from a costume movie of the period, scenario by Sabatini. The poets may have meant these images to satisfy us in their being seen. I have never returned to read Amy Lowell’s poem in any event since high school, here, at least, taking the Pounding prejudice against Amygism as my own.
Let these ratiocinations stand as they are. They present an account of what the propositions of Imagism have come to mean to me as far as they have gone. But a new way of seeing, related to Pound’s later concern with the ideogram, colors my thought of the direct object, the symbol, or the image. The great art of my time is the collagist’s art, to bring all things into new complexes of meaning, mixing associations. I am the more aware that the figures of wet pale faces that are blossoms upon the black bough of some Tree, that the Swan, that the Lady in the Garden, are not only immediate images struck of particular things in their instant seen by Pound, Flint, or Amy Lowell, proper each to its poem, but are parts now of a composite picture, belonging to one passion in me of Poetry. “Only passion endures,” Pound writes somewhere, “the rest is dross.” And these images are part of an enduring memory. Just so, they have been claimed by my mind among the illustrations of my own life, fitting its vision. My vision then may mistake the poems in part to fit. They have waited there long among the shades of memory, and now perhaps that we have recalled them, the course of this study will bring them forward to a new account, until we must read again the actual texts in the present light. But in the case of Joyce’s poem, as with H.D.’s, the memory and the text have been deeply imprinted with the scene of its first reading. Joyce’s poem belongs to one of the decisive events of my actual life.
•
It may have been in 1938, one of those radiant days that October brings to Berkeley after the fog and even cold of the summer. I sprawled on the grass, the little Black Sun Press book with pages printed in blue italics, lovely and most precious, in my hands; and, as I turned for the first time to read Joyce’s poems, cutting the pages as I went, I read aloud to two girls—young women—whose sense of the world was deeper than mine, I felt, so that I was supported by their listening. For they had known poverty and loneliness in
an alien land (the one Italian, the other Jewish, coming from immigrant families). They came from working-class households, close to the burden of labor, it seemed to me, that furnished the essentials of life, food, and clothing, so that they had in my eyes a more immediate sense of the human lot.
Athalie was the young Jewess. Let her be a “Jewess”—for she impersonated a racial elegance, knowingly referring to old ideas of beauty from the Middle East, Levantine or Persian hints that had a mock seductiveness, exciting our sense of the exotic and taunting us in that sense. At the same time she had a bitter knowledge of what to be Jewish meant—it gave reality to her despair. And, being Polish, she had known the scorn not only of Germans but of German Jews. She would bring to play in Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” overtones of a menace that the history of our own time with the rise of the Nazis seemed but to illustrate, where “Rachel née Rabinovitch / tears at the grapes with murderous paws,” reciting the lines with a terrible kind of humor, an imminent threat, so that the poetry and the history we might have associated with the poem became her own revelation to our company that adored her of the reality of some inner risk. “A woman runs a terrible risk,” she would quote by heart. She had barely made—did not finally succeed in making—the transition from her family, dominated by a fanatic orthodox father, from the folk-world of a Polish ghetto and a poetry world out of ancient Hebrew traditions, to the shores of light she thought to find in philosophy. The mind! Her mind was a fire. James and Dewey might be a new testament, and Pragmatism a new dispensation, but the Old Testament and the Covenant remained. Truth she knew by its disaster. Terror of her mad father, pity for her enduring mother, madness and enduring in her self, the old tribal law that put women among contaminated beings, the old mystery that exalted her as an object into the bridal glory of the Shulamite, the old wisdom way that looked deep into the vanity of all things and cried “Fear God! There is no end.”
The H.D. Book Page 6