The H.D. Book

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

  In turn, the germ-idea of the “image” in its beginning phase was a fruition of a general renaissance of theosophy and psychology in the first decade of the century which, like the Hellenistic and the Florentine renaissances, brought back the matter of old mystery cults, “reawakened” the gods and revived speculations concerning the nature of the imagination. Pound’s “See, they return,” Williams’s “Now—they are coming into bloom again!” from the poem “March,” H.D.’s cry—“O gold, stray but alive / on the dead ash of our hearth”—from “The Tribute,” these convey the yearning for the revival of the past in the present, the leaven of dormant powers awakened again. Not only poets but intellectuals in the wake of Frazer’s Golden Bough and Bergson’s Evolution Créatrice were involved. So, we find Dora Marsden, the editor of The Egoist, writing on the image as a factor of knowledge:

  The animal which thinks must have two worlds to think with . . . intellection is nothing other than the interweaving of two worlds. He must have become so well acquainted with his inner images that, when he cognizes (experiences) the outer image, the inner relative springs into effect alongside it. Precisely the superimposition of the external thing by its wraith-like indwelling double constitutes re-cognition.

  Or, again, John Gould Fletcher’s review of H.D.’s Sea Garden in 1917, with its reference to “Plotinus, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake,” may suggest the ambiance of intellectual conversation in which the “image” of Imagism arose.

  •

  The landscape of The Pisan Cantos or of Paterson, like the landscape of The War Trilogy, is a multiple image, in which the historical and the personal past, along with the divine world, the world of theosophical and of poetic imagination, may participate in the immediate scene. H.D. had seen this in the 1920s as a palimpsest. In literature, Pound had written, “the real time is independent of the apparent.” So, Henry James mingles with lynxes and with the divine powers Manitou and Kuthera attending, and Mt. Taishan appears in the Pisan atmosphere. From a photo in National Geographic, the wives of an African chief come into the landscape of Paterson, and a dwarf living under the falls is also the genius of the language. So, in the initial dedication of The Walls Do Not Fall (recalling the Rome/London/Egypt sequence of Palimpsest in 1926), H.D. proposes an image between two worlds: Egypt 1923 and London 1942, which opens into a reality whose time will take a center in the Nativity.

  •

  Pound had observed that Dante in the Commedia had not only given an account of the soul’s journey (or “trip,” as it is called by the devotees of the psychedelic experience) but had also created an “image” of the divine world: the total presentation of the poem was itself an image. The “idea” of the poem is this concretion of three worlds in one—a unity of real time in which many apparent times participate, a central intention whose meaning appears on many levels, an architecture of reality with its ascending and descending spirits—the whole a vision or seeing of a thing directly treated. The particular images of the poem then are seen to be notes in a melody that is in turn part of a larger movement, and these images belong to movements, in turn forming the “world” of the whole, a single great image. This imagination of the “world” to which the intent of the poem belongs is Coleridge’s “primary imagination,” and for Ficino the phantasy that is informed by the intention of the whole, the Image of images.

  •

  “Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished,” Yeats writes of Pound in 1928, “display a structure like a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes . . . and, mixing with these, medieval or modern historical characters.” Then: “He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day.” The whole, Yeats saw as a prescribed composition, or an architectural plan, having sets, archetypal events, even as he himself was forcing his Vision into prescribed wheel and gyre, to get the times right, imposing a diagrammatic order of such archetypes upon history.

  “God damn Yeats’ bloody paragraph,” Pound writes in 1939: “Done more to prevent people reading Cantos for what is on the page than any other one smoke screen.” “HEAR Janequin’s intervals, his melodic conjunctions from the violin solo,” he writes in Kulchur: “The forma, the immortal concetto, the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet.” Yeats saw structure like Bach’s; but Pound contrasts the music of structure, “as J. S. Bach in fugue or keyboard toccata,” with the “music of representative outline,” which he finds in Janequin’s intervals and conjunctions, and which he would seek himself, as “from the floral background in Pisanello’s Este portrait, from the representation of visible things in Pietro di Borgo, there is a change to pattern and arabesque, there is an end to the Mediaeval Anschauung, the mediaeval predisposition.” The poem, like music, taking shape upon the air. In The Cantos, Aphrodite appearing to her son Anchises at Cythera takes form upon the air—that is, upon the element, “the air they have broken up and tempered,” and also upon the air or melody the violin plays, having the voices of birds as Pisanello has the pattern of flowers in his art. Pound works to incorporate the voices of men and even, in the Adams Cantos, the epistolary styles as musical entities leading into pattern and arabesque, to bring forward phrasings and syncopations of vowel-tones and consonants. Yet what he had achieved in The Cantos, Pound came to feel by the time he was writing Kulchur, was not the clear line of Janequin, who had transmuted the sounds of birds into a musical reality, nor the architectural mastery of Bach, but an art—like the music of Beethoven or like Bartók’s Fifth Quartet, Pound says—having “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.” The real time of The Cantos was not to be independent of the apparent time.

  •

  It is the form of the poet’s experience itself that we see in the form of his work; in The Cantos, of struggle and conflict as well as of independent and sublime vision, of stubborn predispositions as well as of taking form from the air. “What is a god?” Pound had asked in his “Religio.” “A god is an eternal state of mind,” he had answered. “When is a god manifest? When the states of mind take form.” The religio was also a poetics in which the imagination was the eternal state of mind, taking form in the things of the poem. But Pound in the twenties and thirties came more and more to depreciate the imagination. Poetic belief, the belief that is volunteered in what is but imagined to be real, contends with the authoritative belief, the belief that is commanded and that must be defended against heresy. Where in the essays of the London period Pound is exploring ideas of imagination and poetry, in the essays of Rapallo he speaks not as a visionary but as pedagogue, a culture commissar, an economic realist, a political authority, and, in each of these roles, he feels that imagination and vision are unsound. Aesthetics has a ground in reality that inspiration does not: “the Whistler show in 1910 contained more real wisdom than that of Blake’s fanatic designs.” Perhaps he suffered from a blind reaction to Yeats’s values, but The Cantos would move Pound again and again to ecstatic imagination beginning with The Pisan Cantos. Leucothea would be invoked throwing her girdle to rescue the Odysseus-poet of The Cantos from the sea of time and space as Blake shows her in his The Cycle of Life of Man [reading Kathleen Raine’s Blake and Tradition, 1969: R.D.], as the neo-Platonists return to inspire the late Cantos. The chapter “Neo-Platonicks, Etc.” in Kulchur does not disown, but it dissembles: “This kind of thing from the Phaedrus, or wherever it comes from, undoubtedly excites certain temperaments, or perhaps almost anyone if caught at the right state of adolescence or in certain humours.” Like the exile of Odysseus, Pound’s exile can be read as the initiation of the heroic soul (the hero of a Poetry) descending deep into hubris, offending and disobeying orders of the imagination, and returning at
last after trials “home.” Odysseus offends Poseidon and is shipwrecked; Pound offends the Primary Imagination and comes at last to trials of old age and despair.

  •

  In H.D.’s War Trilogy the form emerges along the path of a weaving that, like The Cantos, may follow pattern and arabesque in immediate areas, flowers and birds leading on to a world beyond the medieval predisposition (“its art-craft junk-shop / paint-and-plaster medieval jumble / of pain-worship and death-symbol,” H.D. writes in The Walls Do Not Fall) towards the figures of ultimately real things, intuitions of the truth of things. But like The Cantos, The War Trilogy is colored at times by stubborn predispositions. But it is H.D.’s poetics that interprets and transmutes her psychoanalytic and occultist preconceptions (though in “Sagesse” and in Hermetic Definitions, occultist systematic interpretations seek to take over the authority of the real). Freud, and later the theurgist Robert Ambelain, come to lead H.D., as Mussolini and Major Douglas lead Pound.

  •

  The War Trilogy does not evoke comparison for H.D. with the quartets of Beethoven or Bartók. Music as it appears in the Trilogy is transcendental, and the art of the poem has its counterpart in the arts of painting or tapestry, a triptych portraying the soul’s journey in an evolution from the shell fish of The Walls Do Not Fall, iv, that is “master-mason planning / the stone marvel,” to the woman with her child, her Christ-child, at the close of The Flowering of the Rod. Yet the tapestry must incorporate, even as Pound’s Cantos must, “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.” Later in Helen in Egypt, H.D. will refer to the tradition of the palinodia of Stesichorus, of the poet’s restoring to Poetry the truth about Helen, but in The War Trilogy she strikes out, alone of the Imagists, to restore the truth of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to Poetry. Not a conversion to Christianity, but a conversion of Christianity to Poetry.

  •

  There is an evolution of life-forms, experiences, yet they exist one in another; the work of art itself contains in its processes the beauty of the shell and the beauty of the Christos or Logos that in the human world has specific manhood. The image of the whole poem is so thrown upon the imagination or aroused in the imagination, “fixed or moving,” that “fixed” it appears as a tapestry; “moving” it is the path of something happening on different levels in time, it has plot or mythos. Co-existence in the configuration of the poem and evolution in the history or course of the poem’s creation give the dynamics. From the earliest tidal waters of our life, from:

  There is a spell, for instance,

  in every sea-shell:

  to the evolution of the old divine orders into the Christos, not only Osiris but Venus and Astarte are also contained in the “jar” or alembic of the Christian mysteries. These mysteries have their authority now not in a church but in a poem. “Over Love, a new Master”: the announcement of the Christ may mean also that there is a new genius of forms over the poem.

  •

  We too must return in our weaving upon the air, following the theme of image and meaning. To look into The War Trilogy again, the “tapestry” disclosing the “world”; and, as we regard once more the little company of poets or of heretics (H.D. herself working now in a belief disowned by her companions of Imagist days) or of disciples in a mystery, in the Presence that is “spectrum-blue / ultimate blue ray,” that is “a spacious, bare meeting-house,” that is a cartouche enclosing a name, an idea comes into sight—the haunting suggestion of another dimension of the content or form.

  As in canvasses of Salvador Dalí we see not a symbol, one thing standing for another, but what he calls a paranoiac image, where one thing coexists in another—a man’s head that is also a lion that is also a hairy egg, so, here, the meeting house is also a heart:

  We are at the cross-roads,

  the tide is turning . . .

  in the turn of a heart-beat.

  I.

  At heart, we are individual, complete. “The heart of animals is the foundation of their life, the sovereign of everything within them,” William Harvey begins the dedication to his Anatomical Disquisition on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, “the sun of their microcosm, that upon which all growth depends, from which all power proceeds.” I would recall here Helen Fairwood and Captain Rafton in H.D.’s story “Secret Name,” riding back in the dark from Karnak, having seen there the apparition of the “temple or tomb or birth-house,” the thud-thud of the hoofs answering the beat of their hearts, arousing another image of their lying beneath the heart of the mother: “As if they in some strange exact and precious period of pre-birth, twins, lovers, were held, sheltered beneath some throbbing heart.” “First, before anything else,” Harvey writes:

  a drop of blood appears, which throbs, as Aristotle had noted. From this, with increasing growth and formation of the chick, the auricles of the heart are made, in the pulsations of which there is continual evidence of life. After a few more days, when the body is outlined, the rest of the heart is made, but for some time it remains pale and bloodless like the rest of the body, and does not throb.

  •

  Then:

  Whoever examined this matter closely will not say that the heart entirely is the first to live and the last to die, but rather the auricles (or that part corresponding to the auricles in serpents, fishes, and such animals) which live before the rest of the heart, and die after it.

  •

  The poem too begins with a pulse, a melodic impulse (a “beat” which belongs to a unique pattern in time), and the melodic impulse contains a form (as that beat of blood in the egg contains the form of the chick at work). There is then an image that is also (“the first to live and the last to die”) a rhythm.

  •

  Genetics teaches us that unseen coordinates, the genes, lie back of this pattern in time, this rhythm of being, that is also a pattern in space, this form or image—of a man, of a chick, of a poem, then—if it be thought of as a part of the process of life. The “free verse” of high poetry was not abstractly free, but free, specifically, from the concept of a poem’s form as a paradigm, an imposed plan to which the poet conformed. The form was germinal, the germ being the cadence that began in language (“a new cadence means a new idea,” H.D. and Aldington had argued in their 1916 Preface), arousing a life of its own, a poem.

  •

  Erwin Schrödinger tells us in What Is Life? that “we believe a gene—or perhaps the whole chromosome fibre—to be an aperiodic solid.” “A small molecule,” he writes: “might be called the germ of a solid.”

  •

  So too we may think of an idea, a novel or a poem, as beginning at some point or germ, growing, finding its being and necessary form, rhythm, and life, as the germ evolves in relation to its environment of language and experience. This is an art that rises from a belief in the universe as a medium of forms, in man’s quest for form as a spiritual evolution, each realized experience of form in turn the germ of a new necessity for form or affinity for form.

  •

  In contrast, conventional art, with its conviction that form means adherence to a prescribed order where metric and rime arise in conformation to a regular pattern, has its ground in a belief that man by artifice must win his forms as models, reproductions, or paradigms against his nature, in a universe that is a matter of chaos or that has fallen into disorder.

  •

  Schrödinger, contrasting organic and inorganic forms in nature, says:

  Starting from such a small solid germ, there seem to be two different ways of building up larger and larger associations. One is the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure in three directions again and again. That is the way followed in a growing crystal. Once the periodicity is established, there is no definite limit to the size of the aggregate.

  The other way is that of building up a more and more extended aggregate without the dull device of repetition. That is the case of the more and more complicated organic molecule in which every at
om, and every group of atoms, plays an individual role, not entirely equivalent to that of many others (as in the case of a periodic structure). We might quite properly call that an aperiodic crystal or solid and express our hypothesis by saying: We believe a gene—or perhaps the whole chromosome fibre—to be an aperiodic solid.

  •

  Genetic thought along these lines is akin to poetic thought that pictures the poem as an organic crystallization, its germ or law or form being immanent in the immediate life—what is happening—in the work of the poem. “I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity; in law when it is ascertainable,” Pound writes in 1912: “in the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures the determination of the law, or the precise rendering of the impulse.” Free verse, later projective verse as expounded by Charles Olson, developed a new sense of metric and rime deriving from an inner aperiodic formal intuition. Here, structure is not satisfied in the molecule, is not additive, but is fulfilled only in the whole work, the apprehension of the work’s “life” springing anew in each realization, each immediate cell.

  •

  Marianne Moore is a master of poetry that is periodic in its concept—as if art were a convention—which has its counterpart in her concern for social conformities, in her admiration for rigor, for the survival of vitality where character-armor takes over to resist areas of experience that cannot be included in the imagined social contract of poetry. Schrödinger in his bias for the form he sees in living matter finds inorganic crystals “comparatively dull” in structure; but Marianne Moore’s poem “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’,” which is built of periodic units, is not “comparatively dull,” for her zest for language as a vitality in itself contends thruout with the use of metric to make a conforming pattern. Words are not yet reduced to the conventional trivial units of New Yorkerese that they become in her later verse. Yet, in the larger units of structure, the structures are already inorganic. Once the stanza is set, there is no further form, no further “experience,” realized in its extension. The number of stanzas is arbitrary. The poem presents examples of itself, a series that may be “complete” at any point because, otherwise, it is extensible as long as the poet’s rationalizations continue. The form of the whole in conventional verse does not rest in the fulfillment of or growth of its parts toward the revelation of their “life” but in the illustration of the taste and arbitration of the poet. Between the poem’s appearance in What Are Years (1941) and its appearance in Selected Poems (1951) Marianne Moore eliminated three lines of stanza six in “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron’,” and all of stanzas seven and eight, without altering the “form” of the whole. The uncertainty she has often shown about the total form of a poem is a corollary of a periodic or imitative structure where, as Schrödinger observes of mineral structures, “there are no definite limits to the size of the whole.” In its inception Marianne Moore’s verse follows the line of a growth out of a germinal nucleus, and in this it was, especially in the twenties and thirties, akin to that of her peers, H.D., Williams, or Pound. The thoroughly conventional poem projects a prescription of the line-to-line conformity. But Marianne Moore’s growth, being periodic, inorganic, has no internal law of the whole. The history of the poem, for Marianne Moore, consists of instances of itself, as natural history for her is, after Linnaeus and pre-Darwin, a collection of types or models of species. In her technical brilliance (as late as the poem “Style” circa 1956), she excels. The very crux of the poem is its mechanical expertness. But in her poetics, in her thought and feeling of the poem then, she does not evolve as life does but repeats; her verse is not creative but exemplary in form. So there is no process of rebirth, of an evolving apprehension of form in her work, of impending experience, that might make for a major impetus in the later years of her life, such as we find in The Pisan Cantos, in Paterson, and in The War Trilogy, in the work of poets whose poetry had come to be a “life” work.