The H.D. Book (48 page)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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 atom, 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.

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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.

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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.

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It is not in their exemplary character-structure but in their passion, in their ripeness, the fullness in process of what they are, that I am moved by H.D., Pound, and Williams. They move in their work thru phases of growth towards a poetry that spreads in scope as an aged tree spreads its roots and branches, as a man’s experience spreads; their art in language conveying scars and informations of age without armor as a man may gather in his face and his form acknowledged accumulations of what he is in his life, in his cooperation with the world about him.

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Thus, in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
it is the cooperation of the elements of the poem that informs. Not imitating but arising from the beat of the heart and from the breath, yes. . . . As in his “Projective Verse” essay of 1950, Charles Olson was to see the impetus of a new poetry: “from
the union of the mind and the ear that the syllable is born,” the
hearing
of the poem, and from “the
HEART
, by way of the
BREATH
, to the
LINE
,” the inspiration and feeling of the poem. Recalling again what H.D. in “Secret Name” sees, where the poet (the H.D. we recognize in the Helen Fairwood of the story) and the god (the Bear Zeus that Helen Fairwood recognizes in Captain Rafton) have their apotheosis in the apparition of the birth-house or germinal cell, as the woman and man “in love,” heart-beat to heart-beat, are carried, “brother” and “sister” now, “twins, lovers” in one matrix.

“The mind is brother to this sister (the heart) and is, because it is so close, the driving force,” Olson writes, “the incest, the sharpener.” I see his meaning superimposed upon H.D.’s image in “Secret Name.” Syllable and line, Olson has it, are born “of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!).” If, as we have been persuaded by Freudian psychoanalysis, we may read in everyday events and speech as in dreams a language that tells of our genital life, that language tells too of our breathing and of the circulation of our blood. Our consciousness of life, our “speech” then, arising from these.