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In the small-town integrity of John Crowe Ransom as he protests against Dante’s Divine Comedy the sense of limits is all, the preservation from evolution of life-forms. For such an entity, holding its own in the constant danger of being lost in larger more complex forms, the battle against pathetic fallacy is a kind of magic to keep back the flood of sympathies. My mind returns to the cells that came into the dangerous currents of the light and were changed. Some of us dream of such a light and are even infatuated with the thought. So Proclus quotes from Orphic texts:
The Gods admir’d, in ether when they saw
A light unlook’d for, bursting on the view,
From the immortal Phanes’ glittering skin.
But we seem to have remembered too in the morphology of our psyche a panic, as if there could be a withdrawal from being taken over so, we seem to recapitulate some knowledge of the alternative in which millions of cells survived without being changed. “I am hurt by the glare,” Ransom tells us, “even in imagination my eyes cannot take it.” He is talking about the imagined glare of Dante’s vision of God.
Touched by the disturbances that make for poetry, Ransom prayed from the beginning for protection against them. “Two evils, monstrous either one apart,” he tells us in “Winter Remembered,” “possessed me, and were long and loath at going.”
Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat and center.
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It is as if, in our phantasy of cells quickened in the primal seas by the light, some of them resisted the knowledge and could escape the rule of sympathies. A man could be touched by the genius of Poetry as Ransom was and then emerge magnificently free from the ravages of inspiration in what he would call his “proper heat and center.” Finally the disease of poetry left Ransom’s spiritual body, and he ceased having poems in his mind. He could almost be at ease with his friend Brooks who had never lost his proper center. But we know Ransom had seen something in the light Plato saw by, for he tells us “I am hurt by the glare,” and we know that he glowed in the fire of sympathetic fallacy, for he tells us not to think so. The physical sensation remains.
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The planetary regents of Tribute to the Angels are not only figures reviving the lore of an old tradition in the drama of the present, but they are evoked as ministers of inner sympathies. The planets are influences—we have only to think of how interdependent those orbits and gravities are with our own terrestrial order in the solar system. And men, taking the wandering lights of the planets as elements of their thought, of their sky map and their cosmic imagination, have made them symbolic influences.
But H.D. is thinking of them, too, as star-beings, active intelligences. She returns again and again to the prayer for inspiration, for the “power between us” to inform the poem, just as Ransom turned his mind against the possibility of such identifications or projections. In her early childhood she had heard their names—Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. “Venus is very beautiful tonight,” her father, Charles Doolittle of the Flower Observatory, would report. The planets were persons of her father’s mysteries before they were persons of Greek myth. In time, in a lifetime of study, the divine powers of the ancient world would become more and more real in H.D.’s world, most particularly in their late Hellenistic syntheses, where astral cult and chthonic cult had merged with the poetry of what Festugière in La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste calls les fictions littéraires. “I say fictions,” the Roman Catholic scholar writes, “because, for us, moderns, it is evident that the Hellenistic accounts of revelation carry no inner meaning of truth.” So, too, we remember from Freud’s Future of an Illusion when asked by his son who had a peculiarly marked sense of reality if a fairy tale were a true story, Freud replies, no.
But for H.D., as for the Romantics before her, for the masters of Rosicrucian and Hermetic romances in the Renaissance, or for the theosophists out of the Hellenistic period, the fairy tale could communicate the deepest truth. In The Hedgehog she tells us: “Bett made Madge understand that the stories weren’t just stories, but that there was something in them like the light in the lamp that isn’t the lamp. Bett would say to Madge, when she was a very little girl, ‘Now what is the lamp side of the story and what is the light side of the story?’ so Madge could see very easily (when she was a very little girl) that the very beautiful stories Bett told her, that were real stories, had double sorts of meanings.” By the time of The War Trilogy, not only the stories of the old gods, but the great Hellenistic literary fictions of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, and the Gnostic gospels had come into H.D.’s realm of real stories and of double sorts of meaning.
At the same time, as we have traced in charade and roman à clef, H.D.’s life became more and more a story of her life. In the earliest poems, those close to her—Pound, Aldington, Lawrence, Bryher—were projected as persons of story and drama, and beyond these, as mythological persons. Life itself had double sorts of meanings. Did the flowering tree of The War Trilogy actually appear to her? In The Walls Do Not Fall v, she tells us that the track of the story will lead “from a plum-tree in flower / to a half-open hut-door” and in xxvi and xxvii she asks “of all the flowering of the wood” what flowering tree is to be our store. This is clearly the preparation of a fiction. In her notes to Ion she brought in the story of the burnt olive-tree of Pallas Athené, sending out a new shoot of frail silver life. “Pallas Athené, then, was not dead. Her spirit spoke quietly, a very simple message.” The revival of the burnt out tree was an old theme of H.D.’s fiction.
Yet in Tribute to the Angels, her testimony comes with the verity of the actual, an event long awaited, long prepared. The fictional depth and the actual figure contend so that, as she tells us, we do not know whether “we were there or not-there,” but:
we saw the tree flowering;
it was an ordinary tree
in an old garden-square.
So, too, the dream-visitation of the Christ in The Walls Do Not Fall and of the Lady in Tribute to the Angels I take it are actual dreams. But just beyond, creatures of shadow and light, actuality and fiction, delusion and illusion, are the angelic beings. What we are forced to recognize is that she actually felt their presence. Ecstatic in the tide-flow she opened her mind to the invasion of the imagination. “Then came the break-through of astral forms, a streaming down into this landscape, where Bosch’s vision and my own San Francisco were already mingled, of another world. . . . ”
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“More than a little silly,” Jarrell wrote of H.D.’s critical vulnerability. Back of that word “silly” I find the sense in earlier meanings: Seely, “blissful, holy; innocent, harmless; deserving of pity, helpless, defenceless; often of the soul, as in danger of divine judgment; frail, worn-out, crazy; foolish.” Silly, from: “deserving of compassion” to “feeble, insignificant; sorry; unsophisticated; feeble-minded; empty-headed; stunned, dazed as by a blow.” As late as the fifteenth century, in the mind of Medieval Christendom, it had meant happiness; “said of persons, their condition or experiences” when blessed by God. For the sophisticated mind of the Age of Reason it meant what was most contemned.
The silly condition of the open soul was that there must have been so many freaks, frail worn-out crazy rebirths; so many deaths of meaning, relapses into chaotic matter; so many ecstatic explosions in the alembic. We sense it in the course of human genius. The fact of the risk of inspiration is recognized in the common sense of “touched.” Where men have vision and courage for the experience of life itself, even where it exceeds the uses of understanding, beyond the preservation of the species, silly could mean blissful, and it was deserving of compassion, for it meant too to go in peril of the soul.
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The landscape of the dream may be thought of, as I have thought of H.D.’s poem, as
the alembic where radiant powers move. The incandescence is the sun-spot, the tender-spot, the conjunction of the script and the fire. Just here what we are not begins to take life in Us. “We have no map,” H.D. writes in the closing lines of The Walls Do Not Fall. On the biological level, in Darwinian terms, the whole intricately evolved pattern of those who survive gives no map that will tell us the fate of man, for the orders of the living are inbound and informed by the orders of the cosmos that men call chaos or chance. “Possibly we will reach haven, / heaven,” is the only resolution of the longing in us towards what is not ourselves but belongs to the current of possibilities in evolution. This “we” is no longer at liberty but serves the purpose that H.D. calls “Paradise” in The War Trilogy. “The seal of the jar was un-broken.” Yes, and Kaspar was most aware of his cause, his proper heat and center. But, “no secret was safe with a woman.”
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Italicizing, H.D. draws into correspondence the two utterances: “for many waters can not quench love’s fire ” and:
but to an outcast and a vagabond,
to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.
There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call “falling in love.” It appears an evil or a power over us, and can seize us, sweeping from us all sense of who we are. We know it as the cells must have known the first magic rays, as pain, as longing, as loss, as ecstasy; for we are estranged from ourselves in this love or light, and something evolves.
Where we preserve ourselves, ripening into our own forms or species, we must often pray against this “falling in love,” the imperative that might carry us beyond ourselves. For there is the other love we know, the domestic and kindly love for what we are, our daily practice of love. In the highest vision they are one, but in the individual heart that enters the changes towards the higher vision so that “falling in love” may belong to the things we love, the changes are fearful.
It was this “falling in love,” if we read Ransom’s “Winter Remembered” rightly, that was Ransom’s time of knowing the hurt or light or inspiration that made him begin his struggle to reduce Poetry to a domestic art. There was:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Just for the moment he was in that very selva oscura, the desolation, where thoughts stir, in which the great adventure of the spirit in the Divine Comedy or Pilgrim’s Progress or The War Trilogy begins.
But the great adventure of the spirit is in its evolution, in its surrender of itself and coming into the intention of God in the peril of the soul. Towards Paradise, heaven, the light—that has been the eternal promise. The promise that falling in love makes to the lover.
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“Quando m’apparve Amor subitamente,” Dante says: “When suddenly Amor appeared to me, the memory of whose being maketh me shudder.” And he tells us in his journal of the same event:
I thought I saw in my chamber a cloud of the hue of flame, within which I discerned the figure of a lord, of fearful aspect to one who should look on him. And he seemed to me of such gladness as to himself that a wondrous thing it was; and in his words he said many things which I understood not save a few, among which I understood these: Ego dominus tuus. I am your Master. In his arms I thought I saw one sleeping, naked, save that she seemed to me wrapped lightly in a crimson drapery; whom, gazing at very intently, I knew to be the lady of the salutation, who the day before had deigned to salute me. And in one of his hands I thought he held a thing that was all aflame; and I thought he said to me these words: Vide cor tuum. Behold thy heart. And when he had tarried a while, I thought he awoke her who slept and so wrought he by his art that he made her eat of that thing that was aflame in his hand, whereof she ate afeared. Thereafter, short time he abode ere his gladness was changed to bitterest weeping: and thus weeping, he gathered this lady up in his arms and with her I thought he went away heavenward: whereat I sustained so great anguish that my feeble little sleep could not endure, but broke and I was awake. And straightway I began to ponder and found that the hour in which this vision had appeared to me had been the fourth hour of the night: so that it manifestly appeareth that it was the first of the last nine hours of the night.
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Wherever he names the time (la bonne heure) in La Vita Nuova, Dante finds it in terms of the number nine: “Nine times already since my birth had the heaven of light returned,” “so that almost from the beginning of her ninth year she appeared to me and I beheld her almost at the end of my ninth”; again, Beatrice appears to Dante nine years later in the ninth hour of the day. The theme of the beginning in the end, of the first and the last is repeated in the design of nines, where in the first vision of Amor Dante finds the hour of the dream to have been “the first of the last nine hours of the night.” The second vision of Amor is in the ninth hour of the day. A third comes on the ninth day of a painful illness. Hours, days, years—months along, the nine months of gestation, seem missing. Then, in accounting for the time of Beatrice’s death Dante tells us, “because many times the number nine hath found place among the preceding words, whereby it appeareth that it is not without reason,” he will discuss the meaning of the number. First, he must show how the number nine appears in her death: “I say that according to the Arabian style her most noble soul departed in the first hour of the ninth day of the month; and according to the Syrian style, it departed on the ninth month of the year—and according to our style, she departed in that year of our era, namely of the years of our Lord, wherein the perfect number was completed nine times in that century wherein she was placed.”
In a series of revelations Dante has dangerously hinted that Beatrice is analogous first to Love, then in the Giovanna Primavera–Giovanni prima verra passage that she is analogous to “la verace luce,” the True Light or Christ. Now he tells us that nine has reason; first, because it denotes the astrological harmony of the nine spheres appropriate to her birth; then, “more subtly and according to infallible truth, this number was her very self,” “This lady was accompanied by the number nine to give to understand that she was a nine, that is, a miracle whose root is the wondrous Trinity alone.”
But Dante has prepared for the daring of this suggestion in his digression on the license of poets in their fictions from which I took my epigraph at the beginning of this day book. He seems to be explaining his license to a serious reader with a philosophic bias: “Here a person worthy of having all his difficulties made plain might be perplexed, for he might have a difficulty as to what I say concerning Love, as if he were a thing in himself and not only an intelligent being but a corporeal being. Which thing according to truth, is false; for Love exists not as a being in itself but as a quality of a being.”
Things are not what they seem. But poets are allowed, Dante argues, a “greater license in speech” than composers in prose. “The poets have spoken to inanimate things as they had sense and reason and have made them speak together, and not only real things but unreal things.” Is Amor then the creature of such a poetic license? Nor was the poet sincere in that high ardor of vision in which he saw Beatrice so exalted? “Deep shame were it to him,” Dante writes: “who should rhyme under cover of a figure or of a rhetorical colour and, afterwards, being asked, knew not how to strip such vesture from his words, in such wise that they should have a real meaning.” Is it philosophical error or theological heresy that the poet would cover for in his license? Is the real meaning beneath the vesture of the figures of Amor and Beatrice less than or more than the poet would tell us in the poem? In the first case he means to warn us that he praises Beatrice inordinately; in the second case, that she is in truth—“the glorious lady of my mind who was called Beatrice by many who knew not how she was called”—an other higher entity. In sections v and vi of the Vita Nuova, Dante tells us how midway between him and Beatrice there sat a lady “marvelling at my look which seemed to end in her,” so that many mistook the object of his
gaze. “Then I comforted me greatly being assured that my secret had not been made common that day to others by my look.” “And straightway,” he continues: “I thought to make this lady a screen of the truth.”
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From Apuleius’s The Golden Ass or those “fictions littéraires du logos de revelation,” as Festugière would call them, to which the orthodox Gospel of John as well as the heretical Acts of John surely belongs, from the creative romanticism of the late Hellenistic age to Dante’s La Vita Nuova in the transition to the Renaissance, even to H.D.’s War Trilogy written in our period which has relegated the terms of Christian vision as well as of pagan mystery or of daemonic or angelic hierarchies to the domain of illusion and delusion, the response to experience in the spirit of romance has been to seek out the deeper meaning or impact of the seizure that we know as falling in love. In each romance there is a transformation, a deprivation in which beyond the physical, a psychic and then a spiritual reality is revealed. Festugière is right, I think, in his pointing out that these revelations are fictions littéraires, for they come about in an art of fictions, a witchcraft of the Word. And their higher truth or reality remains poetic, a revelation of the power of the reality of man’s language itself. “The end of my Love,” Dante writes, “was once this lady’s salutation [where salute may also mean salvation]; and therein dwelt my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But since it hath pleased her to deny it to me, Love, my lord, by his grace, hath placed all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me . . . in those words that praise my lady.”
The H.D. Book Page 63