•
The germ of this sense of art and life as the creation of a community of feeling may have been quickened even as I began to read in Pound’s Cantos and to have my sense there of art as a personal achievement of form, for in December of 1937, in the first issue of Verve, passages of Malraux’s Psychology of Art appeared. Along with the aesthetic—the concern with the beauty achieved—there was then the psychological—the concern for the meaning that labored to come into existence in art. Going back now I find evidence certainly of what must have encouraged me, under pain of being rhetorical, to search for what would declare itself, however it could in words: where Malraux speaks of “the metabolism of destiny into consciousness,” “across particular modes of expression, a plane of communion amongst men,” meaning seems to try itself for survival with a risk. And when Malraux tells us “That Jonah in the belly of the whale and Joseph in the pit prefigure Christ in the tomb, that the visit of the Queen of Sheba foreshadows the coming of the Magi—such beliefs quickened in the sculptors an emotion that, in due time, infused their representations of Jonah, Joseph and the Queen of Sheba with the very breath of life . . . ,” he seems to speak for me as I would make it clear that not only is the work of the artist to realize a form in itself, but that form is in turn a womb of unrealized feeling and thought that must seek birth in form, in a man’s work.
These passages of Malraux, read when I was nineteen, converted my mind so that H.D.’s later work was bound, as by a spell, to seem a break-thru in poetry of a new gain in consciousness. Or the poem had ripened, having in it now more of the permission to live. There was too, I am sure, the redemption that the religion of my parents, the Hermetic teachings in which my own mind had been nursed, would come into its own, having meaning in this new psychological light. Yet these things converted or redeemed because my spirit had taken hold in them, finding life here and not elsewhere, discovering a self and a story in the threads and images with which it worked its self and story, a—
•
—TAPESTRY. The visual projection of the poem comes to me in terms of a narrative and emblematic tapestry. To spin a yarn; to weave a tale—so we speak in our common use today long after looms have disappeared from our daily lives. There is back of that sense a scene in which the poem and the tapestry, going on at the same time in the same room, belong together. Where Homer sings of the wrath of Achilles and of Odysseus (as in our day, the song appears in Zukofsky’s “A”-12, addressed to Celia Zukofsky—and in her, to Bach—Blest, Ardent, Celia, Happy:
Tell me of that man who got around
After sacred Troy fell,
He knew men and cities
His heart riled in the sea
As he strove for himself and friends:
He did not save them.
Tell us about it, my Light,
Start where you please.
where the poet sings, the women spin and weave, as the poet in turn spins out the thread of his narrative and weaves at the loom of his rhymes and stressed tones towards the workings, the close interrelations of his story.
•
There might have been some “joke,” a knot or pun of the interchange in the development of the two arts—the two weavings where the story refers to a hero hidden among the women at the loom, or to a Penelope who like Shahrazad in the Arabian Nights must contrive to make her weaving or story begin again each day. To avoid something happening, to keep something happening. The exile in which the Odyssey can take place.
•
It is one of the recurrent images of H.D.’s writing of the process itself. “Threads weave over and under” in XXXVIII of The Walls Do Not Fall; and it is in the tradition of the tapestry-maker’s art that we see the foreground of grass and leaves and enlarged insect life in the poem, a decorative area as well as an area of meaning in the story where each part of the work:
differs from every other
in minute particulars,
as the vein-paths on any leaf
differ from those of every other leaf
in the forest . . .
•
As H.D.’s signature could bring to mind the insignia woven in the design of a palace tapestry, and did, as I was working on Medieval Scenes in 1947, so that when the lines came in “The Banners”:
Above their heads the signet of the Prince
is woven, elaborate blood-red signature.
in the vision of those initials, and in the conjunction of Poet and Sovereign Power as one, the dreamer of the dream or the maker of the poem, I recalled, not my own “R.D.,” but a passage in Tribute to Freud, which I had read two years before, in which H.D. tells us: “(I have used my initials H.D. consistently as my writing signet or sign-manual, though it is only, at this very moment, as I check upon the word ‘signet’ in my Chambers English Dictionary that I realize that my writing signature has anything remotely suggesting sovereignty or the royal manner.)”
Chapter 4
MARCH 13, Monday (1961)
Pound in How To Read (1927) and again in ABC of Reading (1934) lists three practices or faculties of poetry: (1) phanopoeia “throwing the object (fixed or moving) on to the visual imagination,” where language operates somehow like a magic lantern or a motion-picture projector in relation to the receiving mind that is a screen. The early definition of the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” is appropriate for the stationary, almost hallucinatory, presentations of early imagist poems—Pound’s “apparition” of faces as petals on a black bough, seen in the blink of an eye or of a camera shutter, or H.D.’s rose, “cut in rock,” that exists in a garden as if frozen in time, as if time had come to a stop in the photograph. H.D.’s reiterated hardness and cut-edges may have been in part a critical reaction to the great salon photography of the first decade of the century, to the blurred and softened atmospheric images of Steichen, Stieglitz, or Coburn.
But these stills are few in number. After a handful of imagist poems, the poets were interested in movement. The sequence of images is what tells in The Cantos, and, scene juxtaposed to scene, line juxtaposed to line, the poem is built up like an Eisenstein film in the cutting room. In the passing of image into image, person into person, in H.D.’s War Trilogy too we are reminded of the transitions and montage that developed in the moving picture.
The other two ways “to charge the language with meaning to the utmost possible degree” were (2) melopoeia and (3) logopoeia: “inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech” and “inducing both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed.”
“Imagism” divorced from this concern “to charge the language with meaning” is not the Imagism of Pound, H.D., and Aldington, proposed in the Credo of 1912. The image that would charge language with sensory impression, “Amygism,” Pound called it, and the image that would charge language with an interesting effect, Hulme’s
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer
or Eliot’s
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
—these are generically different from the image that would charge language with meaning. Perception and expression are paramount where man’s emotions and intellections give value to an otherwise valueless language and world. But, for Pound and H.D., as for Williams and D. H. Lawrence, things and events strive to speak. To evoke an image is to receive a sign, to bring into human language a word or a phrase (in Pound’s later poetics, the ideogram; in H.D.’s, the hieroglyph) of the great language in which the universe itself is written.
Here, to experience is to read; to be aware involves at once the senses and the translation into language of our own. It is the belief that meaning is not given to the world about us but derived from the world about us, that
our human language is a ground in which we participate in the cosmic language. Living is reading the message or poem that creation is about. Such a sense of the universe as a meaningful creation and of experience as coming to apprehend that meaning determines the change from the feeling that poetic form is given to or imposed upon experience—transforming matter into content—to the feeling that poetic form is found in experience—that content is discovered in matter. The line of such poetry is not free in the sense of being arbitrary but free in its search and self-creation, having the care and tension (attention) almost of the ominous, for a world that would speak is itself a language of omens. Eliot’s images are often theatrical devices; but his garden, the drained pool, river, sea, and flowers of Four Quartets are images of charged meaning, having their origins in a more than personal phantasy—they are signs of Self that have come to in-form the poet’s true self, epiphanies of what is happening, not symbols but ideas, seeings of the truth of things. Williams’s resolve in the opening passage of Paterson does not read “not in ideas but in things”; what he writes is “no ideas but in things.” As we enter the poem we are to strive, in order to live, to read such a language of things—river, falls, fire, detritus, words. For words are not thoughts we have but ideas in things, and the poet must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means.
•
This is the charge of the mystery cult, the showing forth of a meaning which is a thing seen, where Image and Logos are revealed in the gift of the Idea. We may see what it means or, sensing the meaning, search for what it means; or we may dismiss whatever presentation abruptly with “I don’t see any meaning in that.” The mythos and dromenon of the Dionysia were a way of participating in the meaningful; the singers and dancers coming into the community of meanings, as the poet comes into such a community when he sings or recites as if our daily words were a language of poetry, having the power in themselves to mean, and our role in speaking were to evoke not to impose meanings. The things of the poem, the words in their musical phrasings, here, are sacra, charged with divine power, and give birth to poems as the poet sings, as the powers of stones, waters, winds, in men’s rites give birth to gods. In the process itself a magic begins, so that gods and poetry enthrall. “Le sacré c’est le père du dieu,” Jane Harrison quotes from Durkheim. “Le désir c’est le père de la sorcellerie.” The intent of the poet is to arouse the content and form of the poem as the ritual devotee seeks to arouse the content and form of the god.
The religious image and the poetic image are close in turn to the psychological archetype of Jungian analysis, which seeks to arouse the content and form of the individual life from the collective unconscious. Certainly, we can recognize in Whitman’s “eidólon yacht of me,” in Lawrence’s “ship of death,” in the “Ra-Set boat” of Pound’s Rock-Drill Cantos, and in H.D.’s “Ship to hold all” in Helen in Egypt, not only the intensity of a personal expression, but also the depth of a community of meaning. The language is not American or English or Greek or Egyptian but the language of Poetry, in which this image of a soul-boat upon a sea in the poetic imagination comes to speak.
•
Pound’s phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia are not reasonable literary terms but such magics, the glamour of wizards being to cast spells, “throwing the object (fixed or moving) on the visual imagination”; the incantations and incenses of Hermeticists being to induce “emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of speech.” The “inducing both of the effects by stimulating the associations (intellectual or emotional) that have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to the actual words or word groups employed” suggests that the poet has powers to induce, to stimulate; but we see, barely disguised, that it is “the actual words or word groups employed” that have such power. The imagination is not the primary imagination that Coleridge defines as “the living Power and prime Agent of all human perception . . . a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation,” but a screen upon which a higher power that Pound calls phanopoeia projects. This image-making or image-casting magic may be Coleridge’s secondary imagination, an “echo” of the primary: “co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital; even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”
•
Coleridge and Pound alike have a common source in their reading of the Renaissance Hermeticist Marsilio Ficino’s version of Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis. “In most psychologies employing the concept of spirit, and often in Ficino’s,” D. P. Walker tells us in his Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, “all sensation is by means of the spirit, and the media of all sense-data are some kind of spirit,” and he quotes a passage from a letter of Ficino’s that bears upon this matter of the music of poetry and the vision of poetry, melopoeia and phanopoeia, as a magic to arouse the mind to form and content, of the casting of the image or echo of creation by some affinity of body, soul, and spirit for the manifestation of song:
Nor is this surprising; for, since song and sound arise from the cogitation of the mind, the impetus of the phantasy, and the feeling of the heart, and together with the air they have broken up and tempered, strike the aerial spirit of the hearer, which is the junction of the soul and body, they easily move the phantasy, affect the heart and penetrate into the deep recesses of the mind.
•
Our consciousness or idea of having heart and mind, as well as of having soul and spirit, being aroused by such a poetry.
•
“The impetus of the phantasy,” Walker tells us, “when distinguished from imagination, is a higher faculty, which forms ‘intentions’.” I would recall Pound’s questioning in the Cavalcanti essay: “Does ‘intenzion’ mean intention (a matter of will)? does it mean intuition, intuitive perception . . . ?” In working upon his translation of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega,” which was to be reworked in Canto XXXVI, Pound takes care to distinguish between the concept of “intellect passif,” which he finds in Renan’s Averroès et Averroïsme defined as “la faculté de reçevoir les phantasmata,” and the “possible intelletto,” which Pound translates as “latent intellect.”
•
“Form, Gestalt,” Pound notes: “Every spiritual form sets in movement the bodies in which (or among which) it finds itself.” Love starts from form seen and takes His place, as subject not object, as mover, in the idea of the possible.
•
Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told:
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The man, pursue his fortunes to the end . . .
so Robert Browning opens Sordello, calling upon will and belief, where the imagination appears as a theatrical magic, a cooperation between the writing and the reading, between the speaker and the hearer, to participate in the reality of a world evoked by words given the magic of belief. “Appears Verona,” the Faustian poet directs, and then, again, as if calling up a spirit—“Then, appear, Verona!” Here the beginning of his Cantos in its first version:
Hang it all, there can be but the one ‘Sordello,’
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks. . . .
“Has it a place in music?” he asks. The answer may lie in our passage from Ficino, for later Pound proposes in this first draft of Canto I: “We let Ficino / Start us our progress . . . ”
And your: ‘Appear Verona!’
I walk the airy street,
See the small cobbles flare with poppy spoil.
“Lo, the past is hurled / In twain,” Browning shows us in Sordello:
up-thrust, out-staggering on the world,
Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at th
e core, appears
Verona.
The evocation is Shakespearean. But this Verona has no stage but a place in the believing mind—a stage belief makes in the mind (as Shakespeare too has but one place where his world is most real). The scene itself then is a spirit. Both Sordello and Verona are shadows in which the form of the poet itself quickens, setting into motion the body in which it finds itself, the body of a belief.
•
In the same years that Pound worked on The Spirit of Romance and “Cavalcanti,” studying Avicenna and Ficino, the London years before the War when he was in the excitement of understudying Yeats, gathering the lore of light and forms that continues to work in The Cantos half a century later; in the same years that he attended the Quest lectures of G. R. S. Mead on Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre, on Hierotheos’s Book of the Hidden Mysteries, on the augoeides and Origen’s “primal paradisiacal body of light as the seminarium from which all bodily forms, both subtle and gross, can arise”; in the very years that defined the lifetime of Imagism proper—from the Credo of 1912 to H.D.’s resignation as literary editor of The Egoist and her replacement by Eliot in 1917—Pound, as a messenger, angel or Hermes, of Poetry, moved between the generation of Yeats, initiate of the esoteric tradition, and the generation of Gaudier-Brzeska, prophet of the spirit or genius of forms which Gaudier called “sculptural energy” and “the vortex,” and of the little group of fellow poets, “Imagists,” among whom H.D. was central. The “movement” was not an isolated literary affectation or strategic front but the first phase of certain generative ideas in poetry that were to reach their fruition, after the modernism of the twenties and the critical reaction of the thirties (when Pound, Williams, and H.D. were far apart in their work), three decades later in the period of the Second World War with the great poems of Pound’s, Williams’s and H.D.’s old age that begin with H.D.’s War Trilogy, with The Walls Do Not Fall, published in 1944.
The H.D. Book Page 35