The H.D. Book

by Coleman, Victor, Duncan, Robert, Boughn, Michael

  you who are occupied

  in the bewildering

  sand-heap maze

  of present-day endeavour;

  it is a reference to the incendiary bombardment that has cast a confusing light upon the common-sense business of men. But it is also, we begin to realize, a reference to the stars:

  You will be, not so much frightened

  as paralyzed with inaction,

  refers then both to heeding the war and to heeding the stars.

  The worship of nature is H.D.’s first heresy; and then, in that worship there is further the willing evocation of and participation in the enchantment of nature. Woodland and sea shrine are primaries of the poet. Helios is a spiritual light but he is always the Sun. But in the first poems the stars do not have the place they are to have later in her feeling of ratios. Hermes is a garden herm; he is not yet Hermes-Mercury having the light of a star. In “The Shrine,” She-Who-Watches-Over-The-Sea is not yet thought of as the star Venus, the dual identity with Lucifer:

  Phosphorus at sun-rise

  Hesperus at sun-set

  so important in the concept of the later work. In the great ratio that morning-evening star will be for H.D. as for T. S. Eliot in the Four Quartets the star of Mary. Eliot’s “Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,” protectress of ships, is the benign persona of that same power, the ancient sea-borne goddess, who in “The Shrine” appears as the wrecker of ships.

  The Orion of “Orion Dead” is the titanic Orion, child of earth, as Apollodorus drew him, ravener of the woodlands. Heat of the sun, light of the torch—what touch knows and can know defines the limits of vision. Her early ratios are all within the reality established concert of sensory-sensual data. “Bid the stars shine forever” I find in “Centaur Song”:

  O I am eager for you!

  as the Pleiads shake

  white light in whiter water

  so shall I take you?

  in “Fragment Thirty-Six” (from Sappho’s “I know not what to do: my mind is divided”) and in “Fragment Forty” (“Love . . . bittersweet”):

  (such fire rent me with Hesperus,)

  then the day broke.

  What is beyond reach enters into Collected Poems (1925) only as it appears in earthly mortal experience, a reflection in water, at most an attendant of dawn. And in The Hedgehog where H.D. unfolds adventure by adventure her sense of the divine world, though Zeus is translated into “the father of everyone . . . like the other God our Father which art in Heaven” and His messengers are listed, the stars are not among them. This God remains the Weltgeist.

  It seems to Madge, questioning the learned Doctor Blum in her search for the meaning of hérisson, that it might be a messenger. “ ‘A messenger?’ Doctor Blum inquired, having, it appeared, forgotten about the eagle. ‘Oh, a messenger’—he remembered—‘like—like what, exactly, Roselein?’ ‘I mean a sort of thing that—that helps people. I mean, like the eagle was a messenger of God, and the cuckoo was God, and the swan was God too, when he was most white and beautiful and had Helen and Cassandra, who made the war of Troy, and the messengers who are called Oreads . . . ’ ” The angels or people of the heaven are birds, but they are not yet stars.

  Up to 1925, anyway, for all of H.D.’s early identification of her time with Alexandrian times, her imagination keeps the bounds of the pre-Alexandrian Greek mind. Like Xenophanes of Colophon, she holds to the reality of earth. “For everything comes from earth,” Xenophanes maintained: “and everything goes back to earth at last. This is the upper limit of the earth that we see at our feet, in contact with the air; but the part beneath goes down to infinity.” This is the chthonian good sense of the Greeks; and the sensory directive of the Imagists in poetry, disciplining the imagination to the concrete and away from aerial fancy, is close in spirit. “She whom they call Iris,” Xenophanes wrote: “she too is actually a cloud, purple and flame-red and yellow to behold.” “The intelligence of Man grows towards the material that is present,” Empedocles taught. Even in Orphism this strong prejudice or practical wisdom insists upon its elements of earth, air, fire, and water; pneuma is breath, and the Anima Mundi is the element air in which we take our living breath.

  The tradition of the substantial resisted the sidereal theology of the Chaldeans “as long as Greece remained Greece,” as Cumont puts it. Plato’s “great visible gods,” divine intangible ultimate realities or essences, were the wedge; but for the imagination to entertain the lords of light or the star of Bethlehem, a conversion of mind had to take place. Vision in and of itself became a highest criterion of the real. Things got out of hand, man saw and took self in what he could not grasp. To have a star then, to take life in the remotest possibility of the real and even in the risk of what was not realized—the unreal—was at the root of the new understanding or misunderstanding of the divine. What we see is Man’s deep and transforming engagement with an “other” world of nonsense, and nonsense, the troubling of reality that we know as Christendom, not only the City of God but also Alice’s “Wonderland.”

  The early determination of known limits remains in The War Trilogy working side by side in the fabric of consciousness with the later cosmic ratios. There is not only the stellar phantasm of:

  The Presence was spectrum-blue,

  ultimate blue ray,

  like the blue aura of popular theosophy or the blue flame or light that Wilhelm Reich, heretical psychoanalyst, tells us he saw in the living cell, but there is also the strong counter-feeling of necessary bounds, that the hermit within

  like the planet

  senses the finite,

  it limits its orbit

  What she has sensed, what she has dreamt, what words suggest are distinguished even as they are interwoven in one experience. “I sense my own limit” remains a primary term of her art. And the dual proportions—the apprehension of the great stars and the humanistic concept of self—give an ironic charm to her admission that follows the “O, do not look up / into the air,” address to those others who are occupied in “present-day endeavour”:

  and anyhow,

  we have not crawled so very far

  up our individual grass-blade

  toward our individual star.

  II.

  The figures of the foreground must be, and their world, seen as under a microscope’s lens, enlarged. To the left we find the world of tidal life, a margin; and the under-water. Her sense here is evolutionary, that given in the earliest life forms we will find “the craftsman,” “the hermit” or “self-out-of-self, / selfless, that pearl-of-great-price.” In The Flowering of the Rod, she will insist again:

  No poetic fantasy

  but a biological reality,

  a fact: I am an entity

  like bird, insect, plant

  or sea-plant cell;

  I live; I am alive;

  To the right: the field where the worm clings to the grass-blade, explores the rose-thorn (that here, in the transformation of the tapestry becomes a forest), eats at the leaf, devours the ear-of-wheat:

  for I know how the Lord God

  is about to manifest, when I

  the industrious worm,

  spin my own shroud.

  This same insect perspective of the psyche appears in Pound’s vision of The Pisan Cantos, in the “nor is it for nothing that the chrysalids mate in the air” of Canto LXXIV that colors the meaning of the Confucian “To study with the white wings of time passing” that occurs later in the same Canto. In Canto LXXX:

  if calm be after tempest

  that the ants seem to wobble

  as the morning sun catches their shadows

  leads towards the “The ant’s a centaur in his dragon world” of the close of LXXXI. These reflections which Pound draws from seeing the actual small world about him enormous are like the mirages or loomings in which ships and the Farallon Islands upon the horizon appear giants reflected from layers of air beyond Stinson Beach.

  In The Walls Do Not Fall
, the worm is an identity of the poet. The identification may be taken as metaphorical, illustrative of the poet’s persistence:

  In me (the worm) clearly

  is no righteousness, but this—

  persistence; I escaped spider-snare,

  bird-claw, scavenger bird-beak,

  clung to grass-blade,

  the back of a leaf . . .

  But the I that was shell-fish and that was also worm recalls the incantations of the Taliesin wherever life has been or is:

  I have been teacher to all Christendom

  I shall be on the face of the earth until Doom,

  And it is not known what my flesh is, whether flesh or fish.

  The Book of Taliesin, Alwyn and Brinley Rees tell us in Celtic Heritage, is replete with utterances beginning with “I have been,” “and the things he has been include inanimate objects—stock, axe, chisel, coracle, sword, shield, harp-string, raindrop, foam; animals such as bull, stallion, stag, dog, cock, salmon, eagle—and a grain which grew on a hill.” These identifications may be also the impersonations of the actor—the animal dancer in the caves of pre-history or the twentieth century student of Stanislavsky.

  There were often times in childhood when, lying in the tall grass, the perspective of the world shifted so that this little scope became the eye’s universe and an ant or worm was hero or protagonist of that world; his journey along a leaf, over a stem, around a stone, became momentous. So that I would forget myself in the ant’s purposes or in the worm’s intent. That was one instance where one’s consciousness was transported to another world that was still this world.

  The other, related perspective, was the one of H.D.’s poem, as the identity would come in dreams, where one was an ant or worm, living a life within a life, in a perspective of the ant’s “dragon world” within one’s own sensible human world. Though I am persuaded to the truth of Freud’s sexual analysis of the language of dreams and of our daily lives, as a poet I know that language has many such realms for the wave of life itself strives to speak in us, and from some parent cell drifting in the first seas, child of Ocean and of radiations from Sun or even from the stars beyond, a germ of animal sympathy has survived to find its life in me as a man. In some protomammal—mutation or conversion of a germinal form—all the yet-to-evolve possibilities of wolf, rabbit, elephant, or man lay hidden; we are co-expressions of the idea of the mammal, members of a “kingdom” as the biologists recognize. There may be then in the differentiated members an intuition of the undifferentiated potency in which we belong to a tree of living forms, and may dream in the tree of being not only ancestral entities but collateral entities.

  There is the curious poetic tradition that Denis Saurat traces in Gods of the People not only of other worlds but of other lives, not only of a divided mind but of a divided existence. What idea of reality lay back of Blake’s:

  The Caterpillar on the Leaf

  Repeats to thee thy Mother is grief,

  Not only trance mediums made trips to other planets and stars but poets too practiced mental traveling “to the other side” of the waters as in Blake or to the other side of the interstellar abyss as in Victor Hugo’s Contemplations. Here Saurat traces a cosmos in which every being has many personalities—“each has other parts, elsewhere in space, elsewhere in time.” “A frowning thistle implores my stay,” Blake writes:

  What to others a trifle appears

  Fills me full of smiles or tears;

  For double the vision my eyes do see,

  And a double vision is always with me

  With my inward Eye ’tis an old Man grey;

  With my outward a thistle across my way—

  The great Maya of Indian thought seems to invade the West. But if poiein means to make, and poet is maker; Maya, Zimmer tells us, means to measure, to form, to build; the maya or illusion of the real is itself in Indian thought a great poetry. It is not out of order that in the poetic tradition of other cultures, even in England or France or in America, like concepts should appear. Victor Hugo in “Pleurs dans la nuit” hears a stone that he has kicked out of his way cry out:

  I took Thebes in its ruin,

  I saw Susa on its knees

  I was Baal at Tyre! I was Scylla in Rome!

  “So each man,” Saurat, gathering the idea from fairy tradition and poetic lights and also from folk-lore of unorthodox twentieth century Christianity, finds “is spread out in time and space, has parts of his being in the past, parts in the future, parts somewhere on earth, parts in the stars and in spiritual worlds parallel to this physical world.”

  The ratio between the worm and the star, the identity taken in the mollusk or the wild-goose, may isolate H.D. from her contemporaries. Deeply as Ezra Pound drank at the fountain of Yeats’s occult lore, though in The Cantos, as in The War Trilogy, angelic powers appear and parts of the poet’s being are in the past, though the ant looms large in reflection, the poet’s identity does not become confused in the web of many incarnations. But this same confusion that isolates H.D. from her contemporaries unites her with the imagination of Blake and Victor Hugo.

  As early as “Narthex” in 1928 we find a conversion in H.D.’s concept from the Greek one-dimension to the Venetian—“renaissance” Raymonde calls it. She practises a magic of warming and drifting identifications. “The sun would soon go suddenly but mites still swarmed within it . . . people . . . people . . . in the porches of the piazetta, in and out of the cathedral doorways. People swarmed and people drifted . . . ” “I want to be a great bee,” Raymonde thinks: “I want to crawl in and forget everything in this thing.” She sees Saint Mark’s Cathedral as a great flower.

  Raymonde’s mind, it seems to her, rises out of confusion, out of hysteria, “a lily, rising on tall stem.” “Loss of identity is the gift of Venice,” she continues: “power to crawl, snail self up the surface of high window and creep half-hatched moth in among tenuous rootlets and dynamic deep earth feelers.” It is this experience that Raymonde cannot share with Gareth.

  “I am the child of Gaia (Earth) and of starry Ouranos (Heaven),” so the Orphic initiate testified in the Underworld. H.D.’s “Earth” or mother was named Helen, was Helena or Greece then. And her father, the astronomer, was a master or keeper of the stars, Ouranos then. The stars had been there in the beginning for her, as her father’s study or property—her paternal inheritance. In the prose works of the middle period, 1925 to 1935, there is the Solomon’s Seal star of “Narthex” and the movie star of The Usual Star, but the stars of Heaven do not appear. In the poems the stars begin to come out—Narcissus in “Myrtle Bough” turns from his “chrysalis of steel and silver” and “who cast my silver-self afar” sees his own image in Hesperus:

  for one star

  rises above the sand-dunes,

  one star lights

  the pool above the marshes,

  “Yourself in myself, / mirror for a star, / star for a mirror.” In “Myrtle Bough” the Greek theme is mixed with “the contents / of Assyrian phials,” with “dreams of Medes and Grecians.” The star cult enters H.D.’s poetry as it entered Greek culture, an invasion of Assyrian-Chaldean-Persian influences—“the Median rites.” In the “Stars wheel in purple” of “Let Zeus Record,” Hesperus, Aldebaran, Sirius, the Pleiades, and “Orion’s sapphires, luminous” appear; they are, we know, also actual lovers. “Take me home,” H.D. will sing in The Walls Do Not Fall:

  where we may greet individually

  Sirius, Vega, Arcturus,

  where these separate entities

  are intimately concerned with us,

  These now seem most surely to be the stars of an astrological cult, but we must remember too that “take me home” is “take me back.” That “anywhere / where stars blaze through clear air” can be London before the War, when that brilliant new constellation of poets appeared together briefly: Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, Marianne Moore; each separate entity intimately concerned with H.D. as none of them were so concerned later.
And back of that “home,” the first home appears: it is the study of the father. In Tribute to Freud H.D. makes it clear that the study, the father’s room, of Professor Freud leads back to the study of Professor Doolittle. These great astral forces then of The War Trilogy:

  where great stars pour down

  their generating strength, Arcturus

  or the sapphires of the Northern Crown;

  are charged with the powers of living men.

  [April 24th, 1963: In the dream I had gone to meet Jess at the country house or retreat of Muriel Rukeyser, but this Muriel Rukeyser was another. Even in the dream I was troubled by the fact that I could not identify the woman, and now it seems to me, for Muriel Rukeyser in my mind has always impersonated the poetess, that the house in the dream may have been the retreat of the Poetess Herself. It was in a village on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a very English village with great trees, that had not changed since the earliest days of colonial America. This Pennsylvania home may have been H.D.’s Bethlehem, and then, because the stars come into the picture, it may be the Bethlehem too, for just before sleep I had been rereading her account of her father and mother in Tribute to Freud. Her mother, she tells us there, was a descendant of one of the original groups of the Unitas Fratrum, the Moravian Brotherhood, of Count Zinzendorf. The Moravians had settled in the New World, in the earliest days of colonial Pennsylvania.]

  What returned to my thought as I began work this morning was the revelation of the stars. For the dream Muriel Rukeyser, the Poetess of the major arcana of my own dream-tarot, took us out to see the night sky. All the stars of the cosmos had come forth from the remotest regions into the visible. At first I was struck by the brilliance of Orion, but as I looked the field was crowded with stars, dense cells of images and then almost animal constellations of the night sky. It was as if we saw the whole over-populated species of Man, and in that congregation of the living and dead, the visible and the invisible members of the whole, we began to make out patterns of men, animal entities whose cells were living souls.