Romance has appeared, and there may have been, in this, a new Eros. Not only the primal cosmic power, but also the Platonic ideal, the First Beloved, but also the most human god that Psyche sought in her quest, but also the Eros that Church fathers, Catholic and heretic, had named an evil, but also now the power of a cult that remains as a mode in poetry. Eros had become a tradition of the poem. Garden and rose, bird and dawn, dew and paradise, are notes now of a melody that first troubadours sang.
I too may be Celtic, and a spell be felt to be necessary to the works here, for weaving is necessary as I go, to keep many threads and many figures so that every thread is central and every figure central to threads and figures, with none coming to its conclusion but leading further into the process. But in this return of the erôtes of the verso as active elements of our own time, we are heirs of work done in the first decades of this century. In The Spirit of Romance Pound related the tradition of Eros from Apuleius to “the consummation of it all in Dante’s glorification of Beatrice” and “the final evolution of Amor by Guido and Dante, a new and paganish god, neither Eros nor an angel of the Talmud.” The poetic tradition of the Grail was related to this tradition by Jessie Weston in two books, The Quest for the Holy Grail (1913) and From Ritual to Romance (1919). The cult of the gods as it is found in the Hellenizing poems of D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Pound in the Imagist period cannot be separated from the reawakened sense of the meaning and reality of the gods as facts of human experience that we find in contemporary studies of the mystery cults, in Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and Themis (1912), in Cook’s Zeus (1914), in the Orphic studies of Robert Eisler, and the Gnostic studies of G. R. S. Mead, whose lectures Pound attended in 1916 finding, as he tells us, “in the legend of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre a prototype of chivalric love.” In scholarship as well as in poetry there is an insistence that the contemporary world must call up within itself the old gods, that there must be a return of the Underworld into this world. “I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter,” Pound writes in The Spirit of Romance, “and one who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them real.” Edward Sapir, reviewing H.D.’s Collected Poems in 1925, saw rightly, beyond the question of Imagism, “the rediscovery of ancient and beautiful ways made apt once again for the hungering spirit.” Along these ways, Eros and Psyche come to reveal their meanings—here, now; there, then. “All ages are contemporaneous,” Pound proposed, but it was by the poetic genius that these terms were created—“all ages” and “the contemporaneous” are perspectives of time that belong to the imagination. The Spirit of Romance was not a history of the actual past but an instruction in the nature of the high art that was to be contemporary poetry.
“Earth’s fallen kingdom contains its original face,” a fellow poet, M. C. Richards, writes in a poem that arrived today in a letter. “Dante found it in a dream,” H.D. writes in “The Guest” in 1946, a companion work to The Spirit of Romance. Where Pound had taken the story of the Spirit of Romance from what he calls “the phantom dawn” in Apuleius to the Latin Renaissance after Dante, H.D., “remembering Shakespeare always, but remembering him differently,” follows the proliferation of the Spirit in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry. Theosophic insights lie back of Pound’s study; Freudian learning informs H.D.’s—but these poets bring us to see the theosophic and the psychoanalytic anew as hints of a primary poetic vision and experience that returns where it will in man’s history. Of certain men, Pound wrote, “their consciousness is germinal.”
Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth . . . the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.
This image of seed and influence, consciousness and germination, reappears in H.D.’s account of a Spirit of Romance brought into the ground of Poetry in England:
The lesser and the greater poet alike met in the unanimous acceptance of one article of faith . . . The dream was greater than reality. Out of it, they built a city, comparable to Augustine’s City of God, or a fortress as formidable as the Castle of Teresa. Francis himself might have learned much from the blossoms of Robert Herrick or the lilies of all kinds of that Winter’s Tale.
The images of the poem, then, were not impressions translated from the given reality of the poet into words but were evocations of a dream greater than reality, a New World coming into existence in the opus of the poem itself. In that New World an Old World reawakened. “The spiritual inheritance, substantially absorbed by Rome, was not lost,” H.D. tells us:
It had been carried, not in iron chests guarded by the vanguard of a conquering army, but it had blown on the wind, as the jongleur, the jester, the beggar wandered, himself suspect, from court to court. He gathered sometimes as he went, strange flowers, it is true, but the seeds of the faith, in the end, blown by the tempest or carried in the dowry-chest of the girl from the south, took root.
An exotic flower—it blossomed only in the queen’s tiring-room or later, in the king’s banquet-hall. Then it was hewn down. But the roots of that flower still flourished and sent out thorny branches.
The seed and the roots here are seed and roots of a poetic faith in which Eros and Poetry, Romance, Rite, and Lore, have become One in the Imagination. Poetry Itself becomes for the new heresy of Poetry a primary experience of the Divine Order. “An aristocracy of emotion,” Pound calls it in 1916—evolving “out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries.” “A Dream greater than Reality,” H.D. calls it in 1946. Whatever we are following here, it is not the heresy of Spirit against Matter or against the Incarnation—for in the Imagination, there is no contradiction between the Radiant Body and the actual physical body: the one is seen in the other, or imagined in the other. What we attend is the unification of visions of the world and its reality once held to be in conflict.
It is of the essence of Poetry that sexual rites, fertility rites, Christian rites, and Celtic rites, may be confused, transmuted in an alembic to yield the stuff of a poetic reality, until we cannot divide the magic from the religious ingredients. The ritual objects of the Grail romance are entirely properties of the Imagination. So H.D. traces in The Guest how in Shakespeare’s lifetime the imagination in the poetic theater took over into a higher reality the things of the church and the things of the court.
Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries. “The church was plundered by the palace; the palace became the background for new ritual.” In the masques and plays acted in the throne-room or the antechamber, the objects from the world of religion became stage properties. “Sumptuous plate and linen, looted from the Cardinal’s palace, was shared alike by Montague and Capulet. Juliet’s tomb was, no doubt, magnificently draped in violet. The candle-sticks recalled another canopy, another burial.” In the reality of actual life, Christendom and Kingdom both fell. But the “original face” remains, for just here, in the fall, Christendom and Kingdom fell into the Imagination. In the reality of what exists only as it is created in the Imagination, Christendom and Kingdom had begun.
That one image may recall another, finding depth in the resounding, is the secret of rhyme and measure. The time of a poem is felt as a recognition of return in vowel tone and in consonant formations, of pattern in the sequence of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meanings. It resembles the time of a dream, for it is highly organized along lines of association and impulses of contrast toward the structure of the whole. The impulse of dream or poem is to provide a ground for some form beyond what we know, for feeling “greater than Reality.”
Chapter 4 Palimpsest
The first great era of Romance is born in the fictional civilization that follows the world conquest of Alexander, as the Hellenic becomes the Hel
lenistic in an empire of Orientalizing Greek and Hellenizing Orient that eventually has its capital in Rome. When again in the eighteenth century, the Western World would conquer India, the dream of Vishnu returns to infect the West, so that in the nineteenth century even in America, with Emerson and Whitman, the synthesizing Romanticism of a new world-mind is under way. And it is to this Romantic movement that Pound, H.D., and Lawrence, in the Imagist period, belonged. Essentially anti-modernist, in the Credo of 1912 with its insistence upon the ultimate reality of the image in itself and upon the magic of a cadence that corresponded with that image—what Pound called an “absolute rhythm”—the Imagists seek a return to Hellenic purity, even to the archaic Greek, in reaction to the theosophy and Hermeticism of the Symbolist movement typified by Yeats. But soon Pound with the neo-Platonism and light-gnosis of The Cantos and Lawrence with the sexual mysteries of his Fantasia of the Unconscious clearly have returned to the Hellenistic basis of The Spirit of Romance. And with a series of prose works—The Hedgehog (1925), Palimpsest (1925–26), the story “Narthex” (1927) which appeared in the Second American Caravan, and the novel Hedylus (1927)—H.D. makes her own full presentation of a commitment to Hellenistic syncretism.
Palimpsest, the central work here, consists of three stories:
1. HIPPARCHIA. War Rome (circa 75 B.C.)
2. MUREX. War and post-War London (circa 1916–1926 A.D.)
3. SECRET NAME. Excavator’s Egypt (circa 1925 A.D.)
as they are presented in the table of contents.
She may have had in mind Flaubert’s Trois Contes, which had been a touchstone in Pound’s proposition of the new aesthetic, the new poetry was to measure up to the best in prose: “Flaubert is the archetype,” he writes in ABC of Reading. And earlier, in How to Read: “Flaubert, by force of architectonics, manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon’s Heaulmière, or his prayer for his mother.” Like Flaubert’s Trois Contes, the three stories of H.D.’s Palimpsest present juxtapositions of the modern with ancient time. Like Flaubert’s Félicité and Julian, Hipparchia, Raymonde Ransome in “Murex,” and Helen Fairwood in “Secret Name,” are drawn to illustrate phases of ecstatic experience, the special psychologies of states of fever or abnormal apprehension. The story “Herodias” from Trois Contes, a modern critic writes, “justifies Hugo’s comment that Flaubert combined ‘the real, which exhibits life, with the ideal, which reveals the soul’.”
But the form of the whole in H.D.’s work was not only that of contrast and parallel between persons as in Trois Contes. The key was given in the title—Palimpsest— and underlined by H.D. in her subscript to the title: “i.e., a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” Each of the three stories of H.D.’s Palimpsest presents a consciousness in which some underlying suppressed consciousness shows through, and, in turn, in each story the attentive reader will find traces or ghosts of the other stories—of Hipparchia in Raymonde or of Raymonde in Helen Fairwood. Palimpsest is a study in reincarnations.
The image of a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another may also be the image of an identity where one person has been erased to make room for another, a life or lives erased to make room for another life. The doctrine of reincarnation is itself not only in the context of our contemporary scientific orthodoxy but in the earlier context of Christian orthodoxies a belief that, where it comes to the surface, leaks through as an erased writing. Even in the world of fictions, the theme of reincarnation can demote a work as being ultimately beyond the pale of serious concern. But that what once was has an objective existence in what is, is a concept current in the thought of science and philosophy as well as in the possibly vagrant imaginations of certain poets. Whitehead pictures the personal identity of a man so, as “a matrix for all transitions of life” that “is changed and variously figured by the things that enter it.” “If we talk of the tradition today,” W. H. Auden writes:
we no longer mean what the eighteenth century meant, a way of working handed down from one generation to the next; we mean a consciousness of the whole of the past in the present.
To come into such a continuum of human life in which our identity contains the past is to find a new dimension of personal life. As we drew the figures of successive stages of Eros in history, we had to do with reincarnations of Eros in writing upon writing, a palimpsest of scriptures entering our thought, to change and figure what we are then once we entertain the mere idea, and becoming the working force, in reading, of an objective reality.
The sensory clues or cues that lead Proust in his Remembrance of Things Past to the images from which the fullness of a lost life flows back into consciousness, or the dream data and double meanings which Freud follows to bring up into consciousness events of a repressed—erased—experience, these are sought out as one might seek out the underlying script in reading a palimpsest. To reclaim life’s first content. As Freud detects or calls up primal scenes of man’s prehistory in Civilization and Its Discontents and in Moses and Monotheism to picture, as before he had pictured the return of the repressed in the individual life, the return of the murder of the father in the life of a collective unconscious, and as Jung proceeds to elaborate the eternal return of the dramatis personae in the theatre of the imagination, which he sees as archetypes of the unconscious, back of these ideas of a recapitulation of primal experience in the experience of each individual of the species there is a reincarnation of an everlasting identity in changing events and forms. The figure of Eros, then, is not only that of an idea in evolution but also that of an identity constantly revealing itself, reinstating itself. As we begin to take our identity, beyond the fiction of personality, in the idea of Man, the variety of persons Man has been may begin to inhabit what we are as we impersonate Him. Divine or daemonic forces appearing in dreams seem to appear as illustrations of the depths of our own being—a being now that includes all that we have come to know Man to have been—and behind their faces we read the faces of father or mother, sister or brother, actual figures of our own erased lives within our present lifetime. Their appearance within us is more significant than their appearance before our imagination.
In Poetry, between the Dramatis Personae of Robert Browning and the personae of the Imagists’ dramatic lyrics, the mask comes to reveal the poet’s inner self. The mode of Pound and of H.D., and probably of D. H. Lawrence, is derived from that of Browning. In reviewing Charlotte Mew’s The Farmer’s Bride in 1916, H.D. writes:
In this, our present day, literary Alexandria, even the most ‘original’ among us may take a sort of perverse delight in finding a new writer daring to discard his personality to follow, remotely or unconsciously perhaps, the tradition of an earlier generation. . . . In England there have been few masters among the poets, but those few so supreme that they stamped, created as it were, a mould for generations of frailer, if not less beautiful, spirits to follow. We have Dekker and Fletcher, and countless others, but the summits and depths of the English language is Shakespeare. And so, drawing nearer to our own generation, the dramatic poem is Browning, and Browning the dramatic poem.
Where she sees her own time as “Alexandria,” H.D.’s classicism is that of Plutarch and Philo Judaeus, and her lyricism is dramatic, not personal, where she would take Shakespeare and Browning to be masters of her art. The writer “daring to discard his personality” not only follows a tradition but is created in it; he must take on personality now as an actor does from the theater in a drama of Poetry. The idea of generating masters or fathers casting a stamp or mould upon generations of spirits, like the idea Imagists had of expressing their generation or time, is related to older religious concepts of reincarnation—the metempsychosis or transmigration of soul, the metangismos or transfusion—the pouring of soul from one body into another—of the Greeks, or the gilgul of the Jewish tradition, in the Alexandrian world. But it is also here the author of the play giving the actors their parts.
Br
owning is such a generating master, for he had developed a form for the poet’s dramatic participation in other personalities in other times. It was a magic of affinities. “Remotely or unconsciously perhaps,” the poet reincarnated himself along the lines of a tradition or spiritual family tree. So, there would appear correspondences between poems of which the poets might be unaware and unintending, for poems were related generically and images came from the fountains of a collective imagination as souls were drawn from the fountain of life. “One is particularly obsessed with this idea in first reading Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer’s beautiful poem ‘Heaven’,” H.D. continues, referring to Robert Browning as the source of the dramatic poem:
The H.D. Book Page 11