The H.D. Book (55 page)

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Yet, with
The Wedge
in 1944, Williams projects a new definition of poetry. No longer the peculiar but now the total experience defines the art. “The war is the first and only thing in the world today,” he begins his Introduction, where
the war
is a matter of stirring up the most general and active associations and sentiments. Then, “The making of poetry . . . is the war, the driving forward of desire to a complex end.” “It is the war,” he insists, “or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.” With
Paterson
I in 1946, the later poetry of Williams begins, and the turn from the concept of the poem as a thing in itself to the concept of the poem as a thing in process is clear. Poems now appear as different sectors of a poetry going on, and we begin to read not only to recognize a thing well-made, its fittings and composition, but more and more to recognize “the driving forward of desire to a complex end.” Themes and images reverberate. Williams, like Pound and H.D., begins to compose in relation to a field of poetry. “Until we have reorganized the basis of our thinking in any category we cannot understand our errors,” Williams writes in his
Autobiography:
“An advance of estimable proportions is made by looking at the poems as a field rather than an assembly of more or less ankylosed lines.” Following
The Pisan Cantos
and
Paterson,
Charles Olson in his “Projective Verse” essay of 1950 had opened his reconsideration of the nature of poetry, to see form not as solidification or codification but as the directive of energies in process, and to see image as vector. With the chapter “Projective Verse,” introducing a part of Olson’s essay, Williams indicates in his
Autobiography
the leap forward in a direction he too worked in, and, placing “Projective Verse” in the immediate context of chapters on Ezra Pound, conveys its relevance to Pound’s poetics.

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“To make clear the complexity of his perception in the medium given to him by inheritance, chance, accident or what-ever it may be,” Williams writes in
The Wedge:
“to work with according to his talents and the will that drives them.” The change in Williams as a poet is toward a conscious art, to be aware of the will that drives. In the “Projective Verse” chapter, Williams sees the poem as “a cell, a seed of intelligent and feeling security. It is ourselves we organize in this way not against the past
or for the future or even for survival but for integrity of understanding to insure persistence, to give the mind its stay.”

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It was to give the mind its stay that H.D. came to Freud as a patient, for she was sick of soul, but also she came as a student, for she followed the sense she had that he had opened a way toward the integrity of understanding in language; he had found a means of translation. “Safety, love, and virtue,” those old themes of the poem that had come so into question in the modern attitude, disillusioned by the misuse of “safety” in the interests of selling the war, by the misuse of “love” in the interests of sexual affairs, by the misuse of “virtue” in the interests of moralistic Christianity, and now it was argued that one must read Dante in the suspension of belief, and even, finally, poetry in the suspension of belief. In
Ion,
in her notes to the close of the play, H.D. recalls her theme of the fall of the city in time of war, the fall of Athens in whose art “the conscious mind of man had achieved kinship with unconscious forces of most subtle definition.” And she tells here the story of an Athenian youth discovering where he thought the tree of the mind, the olive planted by Athené, “the charred stump of the old”: “Close to the root of the blackened, ancient stump, a frail silver shoot”—not only that Athens, like those cities, the Wagadu of the Sahel or the Ecbatan of the Medes, recalled in
The Pisan Cantos,
is immortal, but that the mind itself and the language, charred, burnt-out, revives.

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“Intelligent and feeling security,” Williams says; a poem, “a seed of intelligent and feeling security”—a cell, a seed, then, of Dante’s safety restored in meaning. Is there a common ground in
The Walls Do Not Fall
where Sirius may be the hidden source of true security?

Sirius:
what mystery is this?

you are seed,
corn near the sand . . .

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Where the events of the poem are not viewed as peculiar but as events in a field, having their identity in areas that extend beyond the knowledge of the individual consciousness, Dante and Williams may inform a continuous—but we see it too as an eternal—great field of poetry. H.D. never mentions Williams in her writing after
The Egoist
days, and Williams recalls her only in rancor; but as poets, in the midst of the personal aversion, they come along separate ways to a common ground of language charged with old meanings revived, of form and content as immanent in the universe, where the responsibility of the poet is to recognize what is happening. In
Paterson
as well as in The War Trilogy—it is in this that they differ from
The Cantos
—there is the conviction that meaning everywhere is complex. “You’re listening to the sense,” Williams writes in
Paterson
Five, “the common sense of what it says. But it says more. That is the difficulty.” For H.D., as for Williams, there was the recognition of subconscious directives that Freud had introduced. “I feel / the meaning that words hide;” she writes in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
“they are anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies . . . ”

II

Ion,
begun in the Spring of 1920, continued in the Spring of 1922, was taken up again and completed in the Spring of 1932. With its peroration in praise of the intellect’s work with the unconscious,
Ion
is not only a translation of Euripides but a translation of Freudian thought. It stands as a statement opening toward her analysis with Freud, a preparation, an expectation. “True, the late war-intellectuals gabbled of Oedipus across tea-cups or Soho cafe tables,” she tells us in
Bid Me to Live.
That Freud had brought forward out of classical Greek poetry a central figure in the Greek mystery drama as a key to the new psychology and, more, that psychoanalytic thought drew upon and drew near mythopoeic thought must have attracted H.D., for whom a Greek name in itself had often excited poetic voice.
Psyche, Eros, Thanatos
—the cast of the Freudian metapsychology were members of a new mystery cult, a revival of the Greek spirit in psychoanalysis as it had revived before in the humanism of the fifteenth century and in the Hellenism of Alexandria. The Oedipus complex itself does not preoccupy H.D. She
never pursues the sexual aetiology of neurosis or the sexual reference of symbolic charge. In the “Electra-Orestes” sequence which appeared in 1932, a year before her sessions with Freud, Electra speaks as if she were a mystagogue: “To love, one must slay, / how could I stay; / to love, one must be slain . . . ”—recalling not the Viennese mysteries of the Elektra complex nor the theater of Euripides but the epiphanic intent of Orphic or Eleusinian mystery-play. “No one knows what I myself did not,” Electra tells us: “how the soul grows / how it wakes / and breaks / walls,”—there may be a hint here of psychoanalytic waking and breaking of repressions, and in her refrain “that the soul grows in the dark” a hint of the Freudian unconscious; but neither in this sequence published in
Pagany
nor in the “Orestes Theme” published five years later in
Life & Letters Today
are we confronted with the Freudian concept of the violent sexual love and hate for father and mother as the primary content of the drama. What was important for her in Freud was that “he had brought the past into the present”; “he had opened up, among others, that particular field of the unconscious mind that went to prove that the traits and tendencies of obscure aboriginal tribes, as well as the shape and substance of the rituals of vanished civilizations, were still inherent in the human mind” (as what she had found in the Electra-Orestes sequence was a ritual of a vanished civilization); and that “according to his theories the soul existed explicitly, or showed its form and shape in and through the medium of the mind, and the body, as affected by the mind’s ecstasies or disorders.” Thruout the
Tribute to Freud,
it is clear that H.D. saw him not as the psychosexual theorist but as a guide of the soul, psychopompos—“Thoth . . . the original measurer, the Egyptian prototype of the later Greek Hermes” or “Asklepios of the Greeks, who was called the
blameless physician.
” If she displaces Freud, the displacement is not downward but upward. In 1944, writing a decade after her last sessions, she sees him in the light of occultist preoccupations that were already evident two years earlier in
The Walls Do Not Fall.
The Doctor who stands at the door of the unconscious also stands at the door of the other world, and his once-patient or student now works to bring him from the past into her present terms. Yet ten years before, in going to Freud, she had been in search of hidden content, of “the occult”; predetermined to find in her analytic sessions a way in her
writing that would lead eventually from the Greece of the Oedipus of the tragic theater and of her own early translations from Sappho and Euripides, and from the Greece of the Viennese Oedipus and of her own stream-of-consciousness novels and stories, of “Murex” and “Narthex,” to the Renaissance Hermeticism of the
Œdipus Ægyptiacus,
which she follows in 1957 in the poetic sequence “Sagesse.” Her sessions with Freud were initiations.

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“The first series began in March, 1933, and lasted between three and four months,” she tells us. The second series began at the end of October 1934 and lasted for five weeks—until December 1, 1934. “I had a small calendar on my table. I counted the days and marked them off, calculating the weeks. My sessions were limited, time went so quickly.”

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In 1944, Dr. W. B. Crow’s
Mysteries of the Ancients
calendar has replaced her calendar of analytic sessions, and the schedule of hours with Freud has been replaced by another schedule in which “Every hour . . . has its specific attendant Spirit,” the angelology of the 1944
Tribute to the Angels.
The appointment of hours itself gives pattern. Back of the later occultism, as back of the Freudianism of her middle period, her primary concern in life is for poetic life, and she converts subject matter and design into the working form of her poetry.

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The secret of the poetic art lies in the keeping of time, to keep time designing or discovering lines of melodic coherence. Counting the measures, marking them off, calculating the sequences; the whole intensified in the poet’s sense of its limitation. “My sessions were limited, time went so quickly,” defines the span of the poetic sequence as well as the span of the analytic sequence.

“Here,” “there,” what once was, what is now—this return in a new structure is the essence of rhyme; the return of a vowel tone, of a consonant formation, of a theme, of a contour, where rhyme is meaningful, corresponding to the poet’s intuition of the real. “The heart of Nature
being everywhere music,” Carlyle writes in
The Hero as Poet,
“if you only reach it.” The poet would go to the heart of things because he believes he will find Poetry there; to the heart of his self, not only for his case history, but also for the key to poetic form that he is convinced is there.

H.D. in her work with Freud followed, she tells us: “my own intense, dynamic interest in the unfolding of the unconscious or the subconscious pattern.” The unfolding pattern of the psyche is not primary for her, but the unfolding pattern of a poem the psyche enacts. The poet, like the scientist, works to feel or know the inner order of things, but for the poet the order is poetic, measures that renew his own feelings of measure in his art. The form in process of the poem, the form in process of the psyche, correspond in turn to the form in process of What Is. “The world ever was, and is, and shall be,” Heraklitus says: “a Fire, kindled in measure, quenched in measure.”

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Where? When did it happen? these are terms of a felt form. A map or a calendar. “Isles of Greece, Spring, 1920” of
Hippolytus Temporizes
or the “War and post-war London (circa 1916–1926
A.D
.)” that parallels or sets up a reincarnation of the “War Rome (circa 75
B.C
.)” in
Palimpsest
are intensifications of pattern in history. The extension of historical timing becomes a compositional pattern in writing. Metric, ratio, is at the heart of the matter.

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The artist seeks to render articulate a figure in process. In conventional forms, the poet refers to the literary set pattern before him. But the poet may derive his formal feeling from patterns that he has experienced in nature—from the tidal flow of the sea, from the procession of seasons, or from the growth of organisms. The map of a city, the flow of its traffic, or the daily change of its moods may give formal feeling. So, following the series of analytic hours with Freud that in 1933 and 1934 had been her initiation into the mysteries of the subconscious or underworld, H.D. carries over the “Freudian” presence of the past in the content of the present and derives form from the appointments themselves in
a sequence of poems that are “sessions” of the narrative to which they belong.

The “for Karnak 1923 / from London 1942” of
The Walls Do Not Fall
continues the “there, as here” dimension that she had worked with in
Palimpsest
but now, beyond the earlier hint of reincarnation-time of the palimpsest-time of life written over life in one ground, she may refer too to the Freudian-time in which the experience of the species is the ground of the individual experience. The important thing here is the presence of one time in another, of one work in another, giving rise to possible reverberations—depth the form demands—and information—complexity of structure the form demands; as in rhyme there is a structure of message within message in which sound and meaning in pattern cooperate to give qualities of portent and fulfillment.