The H.D. Book (42 page)

revivifies the image she had known twenty years before of that burnt-out triangle of iron: the inner psychic state finds its fulfillment in the conditions of the bombardment. Reality for H.D. is an identity between the self and the event.

The tapestry itself weaves the theme of the City under fire to haunt all other areas of the poem. It is not only a figure but a thread. In the foreground are woven, recalling the ground of flowers and small animals of Medieval tapestry, the first forms of our life, shell-fish, worm on the leaf, serpent. In verse XXXVIII the analogy with tapestry is openly drawn in answer to the counter questioning of her own thought. The antagonist of the poem argues:

This search for historical parallels,
research into psychic affinities,

has been done to death before,
will be done again;

and the protagonist of the poem defines clearly that search and research, parallels and affinities here are not operations toward a philosophy but operations of a fabrication, open possibilities of design. History, psyche, biology, the physics of the universe are elements of the artist’s creation. The poet and her reader, the animal and plant worlds, the stars and events are revealed in a fabric the poem weaves.

my mind (yours),
your way of thought (mine),

each has its peculiar intricate map,
threads weave over and under

the jungle-growth
of biological aptitudes,

inherited tendencies,

This sense of the interrelation of figures, each particular “map” having its “inherited tendencies” and in turn its “aptitudes,” is on the one hand a sense of life in terms of correspondences and evolutions of form, Darwinian and ecological; on the other hand the artist’s sense of the work itself in which each part derives from and is source of the design of the whole.

Randall Jarrell is snide and means to dismiss H.D.’s work from serious consideration when in
Partisan Review
he comments glibly: “H.D.
is History, and misunderstands a later stage of herself so spectacularly that her poem exists primarily as an anachronism.” Yet the statement “H.D. is History” is curiously right; for she takes her identity in her vision of history.

I make all things new.
I John saw. I testify,

So, in
Tribute to the Angels
she reminds us of another text where John at Patmos “misunderstands” a stage of history—for it is a puzzle of the Christian apocalypse that it mistakes history in order to create a history that had not been there before. So too, Bosch, seeing the conflict of rising nations and warring churches in the light of his Adamite heresy as an Armageddon, misunderstands the “history” of his times. But to speak of misunderstanding thus is to misunderstand History itself, for historians, no less than artists, are creative and
make all their things new.
Gibbon and Spengler have their fire in their “misunderstanding.” Thoth, Mercury, is patron of thought itself, mercurial where it informs.

•

“To show how the worm turns” means something mercurial about the psyche, about the worm turning into its butterfly; means too something hermetic about the evolution of the psyche—the worm or dragon, the old serpent, that turns to betray us in ourselves. Following the tradition of the tapestry, the worm on the leaf is just such a detail of the flowering ground as we have seen in medieval work; and turns or leads into other figures of the scene:

Gods, goddesses
wear the winged head-dress

or horns, as the butterfly
antennae

to reappear in “the erect king-cobra crest,” the
uraeus
of the god-crown of Egypt.

•

From
The Book of the Dead
I find: “Understanding said of him, ‘He is like that which he creates’.”

March 12, Sunday

In
The Walls Do Not Fall,
the quick-changing mercurial and the conspiring hermetic appear in the experience of the War itself.

We have seen how the most amiable,
under physical stress,

become wolves, jackals,
mongrel curs;

“Let us, therefore,” H.D. turns: “entreat Hest”

in her attribute of Serqet,

the original great-mother,
who drove

harnessed scorpions
before her.

I
.

In the background—a scene resembling the City under Fire in
Lot’s Daughters,
a painting attributed to Lucas of Leyden, reproduced in
Verve,
January–March 1939. For H.D., it is not a City of the Plain but does recall Pompeii, Nineveh, and Babel. In
Tribute to the Angels,
in the central panel, it is compared to Rome, Jerusalem, Thebes. Above, there is the night sky with stars—Sirius, Vega, Arcturus; the constellations—Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Waterman, Aries—“the wandering stars” and “the lordly fixed ones.” Over the world-city, over actual London, the skies open up and pour out their flames. It is the old wrath of god; it is the actual new incendiary attack. Fallen walls and blackened dwellings stand out, silhouetted in the raging light.

So, when in the poem, the poet says:

O, do not look up
into the air,

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.