The H.D. Book (30 page)

. . . that each of these citizens of culture had created for himself a personal ‘Parnassus’ and ‘School of Athens.’ From among the great thinkers and artists of all nations he had chosen those to whom he conceived in
himself most deeply indebted for what he had achieved in enjoyment and comprehension of life, and in his veneration had associated them with the immortals of old as well as with the more familiar masters of his own tongue.

•

It is not the world of nature from which the poet feels himself alienated. One of the primaries of the poet is his magic identification with the natural world—“the pathetic fallacy” the rationalist-minded critics and versifiers call it. Freud’s cosmopolitan man is a poet and a primitive mind, for in his pathetic union with the world, he “enjoyed the blue sea, and the grey; the beauty of the snow-clad mountains and of the green pasture-lands; the magic of the northern forests and the splendor of the southern vegetation . . . the silence of nature in her inviolate places.” To find joy in the blue sea or beauty in mountains, magic in forests, splendor and silence in nature, is to live in an environment transformed by human sentiments; for these qualities are just that increment that would make man a lord. The joy and the splendor exist in a magic reciprocity—a property that is not capital; an increment that is not usury. Joy, magic, splendor, beauty, and the silence of
“inviolate places”
are pathetically present too in the language of the Aranda sexual organs and orifices, the “secret” organs of joy, magic, and splendor in the flow of blood and urine, the excitement and release of orgasm.

So too, the nature poems of H.D.—the early poems of sea and orchard, shell and tree in full blossom or fruit—betray, in their troubled ardor, processes of psychological and even sexual identification, and those critics who have rebuked her for these poems may be disturbed by content in the poem they do not want to recognize. In “Orchard,” she writes: “and I fell prostrate / crying: / you have flayed us / with your blossoms.” This flowering tree—it is the flowering half-burnt-out tree of
The Flowering of the Rod
—may also be the emotional tree of a sexual encounter; for this poem addresses the “rough-hewn / god of the orchard,” “alone unbeautiful,” “son of the god,” and in its first publication in
The Egoist
was titled “Priapus (Keeper of Orchards),” and the “you” was then “thou,” the too-intimate almost forbidden second person pronoun in English. The first pear falling, the thundering air and the honey-questing
bees of the poem appear then in a poetic magic in which the natural environment and the sexual experience are fused. The intensity belongs neither to the tree as object nor to the priapic penis as object but to the evocation of the image in which they are fused.

Nor is it from the world of the ancestors that the poet feels alienated. The ultimate reality that the eternal ones of the dream have for the Aranda—the ultimate reality that our toys and imaginary playmates had for us in childhood—Moses, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Hannibal have for Freud; and Sappho, Euripides, Shakespeare, or Browning have for H.D. They are forefathers of the work, but they seem also at times previous reincarnations of the spirit at work.

These poems where many persons from many times and many places begin to appear—as in
The Cantos, The Waste Land, Finnegans Wake,
The War Trilogy, and
Paterson—
are poems of a world-mind in process. The seemingly triumphant reality of the War and State disorient the poet, who is partisan to a free and world-wide possibility, so that his creative task becomes the more imperative. The challenge increases the insistence of the imagination to renew the reality of its own. It is not insignificant that these “poems containing history” are all products of a movement in literature that was identified in the beginning as “free” verse.
The Egoist,
where Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Lawrence, and Aldington first appeared together had formerly been
The New Freewoman;
free verse went along in its publication with articles on free love and free thought. And the “new” we find also as a demand. In his quarrel with Eliot, Williams could oppose the “new” to the “past”—as if all of the past were what Eliot meant by his “tradition.” But the definition of the “new” was given by Ezra Pound from Confucius in “Make It New,” and in
The Spirit of Romance
and the essay “Cavalcanti” he turns to the late Medieval reawakening of poetic genius not with the antiquarian’s concerns but in search of enduring terms for the renewal of poetry in his own time. The study of literature, he wrote then, was “hero-worship”—“It is a refinement or, if you will, a perversion of that primitive religion.”

The image, for the Imagists, was something actually seen. “At least H.D. has lived with these things since childhood,” Pound writes to Harriet Monroe in 1912, “and knew them before she had any book-knowledge
of them.” In
ABC of Reading
he argues for a statement of Dante’s as a starting point:

because it starts the reader or hearer from what he actually sees or hears, instead of distracting his mind from that actuality to something which can only be approximately deduced or conjectured FROM the actuality, and for which the
evidence
can be nothing save the particular and limited extent of the actuality
.

In the major phase of his last years William Carlos Williams, the poet who was to have “no ideas but in things,” would relate poetry to dream and to phantasy, as H.D. in “Good Frend” would project the fictional life of Claribel who had no more actuality than her being mentioned in passing in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest—
itself a drama of the poet’s powers to enchant—and in
Helen in Egypt
H.D. would weave another fiction of persons who belong not to actuality but to an eternal dream. But the bias for what Williams called “the local conditions” as the primary impetus is strong and continues to haunt my own generation.

The immediate persuasion of Imagist poets was against the fantastic and fictional as it was for the clear-seeing, even the clairvoyant, and the actual, for percept against concept. The image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in time” or “the local conditions” could open out along lines of the poet’s actual feeling. The poem could be erotic and contain evocations of actual sexual experience as in the poem “Orchards.” And then, the image was also something actually seen in the process of the poem, not something pretended or made up. It was the particular image evoked in the magic operation of the poet itself—whatever its source, and it usually had many sources. In reviewing Fletcher’s poetry in 1916, H.D. may be speaking too of her own art:

He uses the direct image, it is true, but he seems to use it as a means to evoke other and vaguer images—a pebble, as it were, dropped in a quiet pool, in order to start across the silent water, wave on wave of light, of colour, of sound.

There was in the image a presentation that gave, Pound writes in “A Stray Document,” “that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of
freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.” When he tells us that the total plan of Dante’s
Commedia
is itself an image, there is a possibility that the image is something seen of or in the “other” world, a clairvoyance. Works of art here are works of a magic comparable to the imaginative practices of Vital or Ficino in which the imagination is thought of as a higher vision. In Pound’s “Aux Etuves de Wiesbaden,” Poggio says: “We are fortunate to live in the wink, the eye of mankind is open; for an instant, hardly more than an instant.”

The
personae
of the Imagists had derived from the
dramatis-personae
of Robert Browning. Pound and H.D. wrote not in the tradition of the personal lyric, but they drew upon the dramatic choral lyric and the trance-voice of religious evocation to charge the actual with meaning. In this making the actual the condition of the true and the real, there was a curious consequence. For those elements of the imagination that are usually distinguished from what is actual—the impersonations, the projections, the creations of worlds and the speculations in ideas—return now in their higher truth and reality to be identified with the actual. In such an operation, H.D. suggests in her notes to
Ion,
for the devotee of Euripides, the actor of Hermes is indeed Hermes:

Roughly speaking, there were two types of theatre-goers in ancient Greece, as there are today. Those who are on time and those who are late. The prologue is the argument or libretto; it outlines the plot. The ardent lover of the drama will doubtless be strung up to a fine pitch of intensity and discrimination from the first. The presence of this actor, who impersonates the god Hermes, will actually be that god. Religion and art still go hand in hand.

If poetry has to do with enchantment and the imagination has traffic with what is not actual but a made-up world, if indeed these would-be serious poets wove a romance of the actual itself, then religion and art may both be fictional and the intensity of their truth and reality is the intensity needed to make what is not actual real. The crux for the poet is to make real what is only real in a heightened sense. Call it his personal feeling, or the communal reality, it exists only in its
dance, only to its dancers. Outside the created excitement, what we call the inspiration of art, the things done—the bleeding, the exhibition of private parts, the reiterated correspondences of the human world to the great world of nature and the eternal world of the dream—do not communicate. The reader of the poem must be just such an ardent lover as the communicant of the Mass, or the magic of the sacrament is all superstition and vanity. Christ is not actually there, even where He is most real.

The poet and the reader, who if he is intent in reading becomes a new poet of the poem, come to write or to read in order to participate through the work in a consciousness that moves freely in time and space and can entertain reality upon reality. “He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read,” Robert Frost says, comparing the poet to a water-spout at sea:

. . . and first the cloud reaches down! toward the water from above, and then the water reaches up! toward the cloud from below—and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth: the base of water he picks from below, all the life he lived outside of books.

But, in eternity, there is a cloud below, a sea above, as well: books are real and also imagined, and they must be included if we would draw upon all the life we have lived. Life, a dream or a stage on which we act, is also larger than the life we have lived, for its reality is extended in all the poets we have read.

In this great poetry, “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” may have its resonance with “To-morrow, and to-morrow and to-morrow, / Creepes in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time”; for we have come in the comparison of languages to imagine one human Language from many tongues. If the language of Matthew be inspired, so is the language of Shakespeare. Christ and Macbeth have become personae of a world-poem. Not only this is true, but if it is, then also this is true. It has come to pass, anyway, that only in the imagination are Christ and Macbeth surely real.

In Horace a man speaks to his own poetic faculty even as to another person; and they are not the words of Horace only but he says them as though reciting the words of the good Homer, here in his
Poetria: Dic mini Musa, virum,
etc. In Ovid Love speaketh, as he were a human being, in the beginning of the book named
Remedy of Love,
here:
Bella mihi, video, bella parantur ait.
And by this may all be made clear to one who finds a difficulty in certain parts of this my little book. —Dante Alighieri,
La Vita Nuova,
xxv

MARCH
10,
FRIDAY
. 1961. (1963)

Naming the stars out of the seas of heaven, men drew a net-work. The knots were suns, were burning. What the poets who bound the dragon of their confusion spun were lines of association where figures of light appeared, giving direction. All life is oriented to the light from which life comes. The bees in their dances are oriented to the sun and, if it is dark, will dance in relation to a candle flame. Men found at night a new orientation in the stars, found a heaven, a spreading mesh of lights, that became a projected screen of where and when they were as they danced, an image of another net that in memory we throw out over moment and place that are suns in time, the net of our selves. The bees dance to tell where the honey is.

They memorized as they realized. In turn, now, the surfaces and involvements of the brain were an imprint of the seas above; and the
skydome above was the image of another configuration in the skull-dome below. So, a network there too bound the dragon of a confusion in constellations of living cells that made up a body or series of imaginary bodies a man was, is, would be.

•

It was a map. It was a great design of where they were and then of when. Night after night here in the country I have been learning my stars. The wavering cold of a mixed winter and spring, as if those distant lights were within the aroma of March blossomings, the lilac, lemon, and grasses, of the star-world, brings a fragrance of stars. Earth sparks of scent seem just to have flown up into those signs of the ancient ways in which the book of when-where sparkles and glows. As we come home from an evening with neighbors, Orion is in the high heaven.

•

The figure of the giant hunter in the sky brings with it, as often, the creative genius of Charles Olson for me. Since the appearance of
Origin
I a decade ago, my vision of what the poem is to do has been transformed, reorganized around a constellation of new poets—Olson, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley—in which Olson’s work takes the lead for me. This man, himself a “giant”—six foot seven or so—has been an outrider, my own Orion.