The H.D. Book (46 page)

After the excitement in the authenticity of masterpieces, having resistant individuality and a demanding skill, I have come to see such works not as the achievement of inventors or masters or diluters or starters of crazes, as Pound would have us classify writers in his
ABC of Reading,
not as objects of a culture, embodying original sensibilities, but as events in another dimension, a field of meanings in which consciousness was in process; where I saw psyche and spirit, as I had come thru Darwin to see the animal organism, arising in an evolution of possible forms, surviving, perishing, derived always from an inheritance in which the formal persisted, arriving always as a trial or essay in which the formal had to live the last of a species, the first of a species, and yet having only its own terms, its own life, in which to make it. Every manifestation of spirit is the matter from which spirit must derive itself.

What is intent here? “Does ‘
intenzion
’ mean intention (a matter of will)?” Pound asks, seeking the sense of certain terms of Cavalcanti, “as understood at that particular epoch,” he stresses: “does it mean intuition, intuitive perception . . . ?” The psyche strives to realize; the spirit . . . to render clear? to rarify?—but I would take spirit in a rock,
who am yet obsessed with light. Intent is ours for we are at work; and may change its aspect where form is not a container or an object but “an extension of content.”

It is the ground art makes for the experience and the dream to become communal that I most value. Our own dreams, like our own lives, are fleeting and insubstantial, unless they are delivered over from the personal into the commons of man’s dream. The man I am would stake my person from him, if it would not give itself to his intent. In works of art what was a passing fancy labors to become a lasting fantasy, the “Dream, Vision” of H.D.’s later poetic, personality to become manhood; for our manhood to be a ground of reality, for the gods to flourish, “stepped out from Velasquez.”

•

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.)”

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.”