The H.D. Book (59 page)

There is a spell, for instance,
in every sea-shell:

continuous, the sea-thrust
is powerless against coral,

bone, stone, marble
hewn from within by that craftsman,

the shell-fish:

and that at the same time sustains “that flabby, amorphous hermit / within”—the possibility for the living organism to keep its tenderness to experience, its vital weakness—and is so designed “the stone marvel” to obey:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow:

Is the command of Pallas Athena in
Ion,
the “of nothing too much” imperative of strongly felt ratios and proportions, ultimately mathematical not psychological, reiterated in the “of nothing-too-much” in the song of the mollusc, master-mason, of
The Walls Do Not Fall?
As too, it is the injunction of the rational genius, the gift or grace or command of ratio, that quickens with the first motif of the poem, the “here / there,” giving a sense of proportions in time. The individuation process, to know limits in knowing the beyond, to feed and to convert to one’s own body-chemistry, may belong then beyond the biological to the physical, mathematical reality whose laws we sense as formal imperatives.

•

So, in the fabric of The War Trilogy, life-centered as it is, ultimately humanized, where we read “Splintered the crystal of identity,” we may
not be wrong to read into this that identity is thought of here as a crystallization process contrasted with personality which is animal. Then loosely evoked, in passing, there are other hints of extrahuman forces at work. There is “this is the age of the new dimension,”—changing from the suggestion of physics to that of magic and of depth psychology to mean “occult lore” and then “sub-conscious ocean”; for in this passage of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
the voice of the adversary of the poem is beginning to take over, the poem incorporating its own antibody. Where we find incorporated accusations that H.D. is “stumbling toward / vague cosmic expression,” . . . “jottings of psychic numerical equations,” and in the close of
The Walls Do Not Fall:
“
lightning in a not-known,
/ unregistered dimension,” hints of an idea that the poem may have to do, our identity may have ultimately to do then, with our consciousness of our atomic physical reality as an event in process. An identity felt not in personality or psyche but in the very chemical nature in which we have our being. That briefly, H.D. had addressed in her “Hellenic perfection of style,” an art directed not by psychological formations but by the higher claim of physical impulses, the formal drive of the cosmos. “For this new culture was content,” H.D. writes of the Ionic spirit, “as no culture had been before, or has since been, frankly with one and but one supreme quality, perfection.”

September 2, 1964

In the current issue of the poets’ journal
Open Space,
I find in an un titled poem by Harold Dull upon listening to the opera
Orfeo
the concept that in each step of the life drama of Orpheus he gains a question: “and by the time / he goes into the dark / to lose her the second time”:

he has as many apparently forever to be unanswered questions
as there are strings on his lyre.

striking a chord with those passages of H.D.’s
Helen in Egypt
where in Book Two of the “Eidolon” section it seems that Helen in her living has gained “a rhythm as yet unheard,” and that history—the war at Troy and Troy’s fall are “Apollo’s snare / so that poets forever, / should be caught in the maze of the Walls / of a Troy that never fell.”

“Was it a question asked / to which there was no answer?” H.D. asks, and then:

who lured the players from home
or imprisoned them in the Walls,

to inspire us with endless,
intricate questioning?

So the proposition of the last poem in “Eidolon,” Book Two, states: “
There is only a song now and rhetorical questions that have been already
answered
.” But the rhetorical question, it has already been answered in the poem, is meant not to find its answer but to incite the movement of the poem, leads on, opening a way for the flow of the poetic feeling to go, question and answer for the sake of a rhythm; as the questions of high and low, of the gap in society or consciousness or concept, of the proposition taken up from William James’s
Principles of Psychology
of many realities entering into the picture of the total world of man’s experience, or the idea of a Permission or Grace given, are instrumental and will be seen at last to be as many as the strings of the lyre to which they belong upon which I play. The lyre in turn existing for the sake of the book I am making here, drawing from the faces of Pound, Williams, H.D., the faces of the book’s Pound, Williams, H.D., or from the face of the Permission Itself, the face that appears in the drawing, belonging to the work we are about, you with me, if you follow. “There is a spell, for instance,” the Poet has told us in the beginning, “in every sea-shell,” that given life we make it a life of our own, and that that lasts—the potsherd, the ghostly outlines of Mohenjodaro’s city plan, the song of Troy—when the life and the men are lost. Back, back, back we must go to find sufficient self to live in to these beings, taking being.

For I needed this book for a place for her to exist in me. “The fate of modern poetry as a whole,” Burkhardt wrote a century ago in
The Three Powers,
“is the consciousness, born of the history of literature, of its relationship to the poetry of all times and peoples. On that background, it appears as an imitation or echo.” By imitation or echo alone then, if they alone are possible. Searching whatever text mind or heart recalled, argument or the beginning of a rhythm, to find out an H.D., the H.D. this book means to unfold. A rhetorical question, to give rise, as the pencil draws, as the brush paints, to a figure of many faces known and yet to be known. The lady has her own life. She is not now Hilda Doolittle, and only in her special sense is she the poetess H.D.—she is the person who narrates her story in The War Trilogy and she has just that one poem in which to exist; as Claribel of H.D.’s poem “Good Frend” is given the poem in which to have a life, to be a person of the drama. She is not in the
Dramatis Personae
of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest,
where she is named only in passing “
the king’s fair daughter Claribel
”:

And we read later,
in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis:

Claribel was outside all of this,
The Tempest
came after they left her;
Read for yourself,
Dramatis Personae.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Read through again,
Dramatis Personae;
She is not there at all, but Claribel,
Claribel, the birds shrill, Claribel,
Claribel echoes from this rainbow-shell,
I stooped just now to gather from the sand;

has just that poem “Good Frend” in which to exist in the heart of H.D., taken over from Shakespeare. Go read thru The War Trilogy; you will see how I have taken up what would furnish my even blind will as I work with its substance. As if I were a gap, making up my self. A critical study? There may be times when the painter sees his own insight in a passage of his painting and he had then to look deeper until he saw what otherwise might have been his insight as the work’s factor. And passages of fine writing, bravura, might come in, only to be obliterated in the trying, painstaking drawing out of a task he knew no other way to do, or kept once he had taken that way, like the under drawing showing thru in Picasso’s
Guernica
that reminds us it is to participate in the idea that we work, line over line as in the first drawings we recall in the cave’s depths, and so in faith—his one faith—in the saving grace of his being involved in the Work itself, and having this work given—as if in love giving himself over to the Work—in the (unknown) creative will that drives all speech, all writing, all language he believes. . . .

You know the poem, you have read it well. I do not feel you do justice to The War Trilogy yet, you write; for you as a friend (a reader) of the original know it is so much more, so much other than the likeness I have drawn. Or you, who have never loved (read) the original, tell me that I make too much of a poor matter, the passages of the poem that appear never come up to the poem I am imagining. The lady smiles at us, for this figure I am drawing from of the Lady with a Book may be the very lady who appears in her
Tribute to the Angels,
her author in my author:

which is no easy trick, difficult
even for the experienced stranger,

H.D. tells us. Is she talking about this Person’s relating Herself to time here, in the rhythm of the clock’s ticking, to appear to the poet in her dream? But it is a double image, for the Lady appears to the reader as She appeared to the writer in the medium of the poem, another trick, in the hypnotic measure, the evocative tick of syllables in procession. She is so communicated.

My other reader who is not H.D.’s reader, who does not get what I draw from or, unsympathetic, sees only in a bad light or a poor light—what can be known of my own sense in working of how little I get it, how blurred often the work is, yet, for I have been working here over four years, having always the source of the original that does not go dead on me, that gives again and again, of what a life there is in this for me, keeping the nexus of what she means to me working in the imagination.

I see her as you project her
not out of place

the reader or critic with goodwill addresses the artist in
Tribute to the Angels:

you have done very well by her
(to repeat your own phrase),

you have carved her tall and unmistakable,
a hieratic figure, the veiled Goddess,

“O yes—you understand,” the poet replies:

but she wasn’t hieratic, she wasn’t frozen,
she wasn’t very tall . . .

•

She was demented surely. Though analysis may read unconscious sexual content in poems, only in the early erotic masque
Hymen
with its “dark
purple” color have I found overt reference to sexuality, heat and snow of maiden chastity, and then in the tradition of the true nuptial rite a recounting of what happens in the taking of the flower of the bride’s vagina:

There with his honey-seeking lips
The bee clings close and warmly sips,
And seeks with honey-thighs to sway
And drink the very flower away.

(Ah, stern the petals drawing back;
Ah, rare, ah virginal her breath!)

Crimson, with honey-seeking lips
The sun lies hot across his back,
The gold is flecked across his wings.
Quivering he sways and quivering clings
(Ah, rare her shoulders drawing back!)
One moment, then the plunderer slips
Between the purple flower-lips.

These images clothe but to enhance the sexual lure. But thruout her work she bears testimony to a fever that is not localized, the heat of “Mid-Day” and a fierce yearning that can be avid, a sensuality that can declare, as in “Red Roses for Bronze”:

sensing underneath the garment seam

ripple and flash and gleam
of indrawn muscle
and of those more taut,
I feel that I must turn and tear and rip
the fine cloth
from this moulded thigh and hip,
force you to grasp my soul’s sincerity,

The clothing postpones, incites, and increases the craving the sexual organ itself will exorcise. The question that calls up not an answer but an increased rhetoric or current, the freefloating desire, takes over. In the prose work
Nights,
written in the 1930s, Natalia Saunderson seeks
this excitement in itself in making love; as a poet might seek the excitement of inspiration in itself in writing poetry:

Her deity was impartial; as the radium gathered electric current under her left knee, she knew her high-powered deity was waiting. He would sting her knee and she would hold muscles tense, herself only a sexless wire that was one fire for the fulfillment. She was sexless, being one chord, drawn out, waiting the high-powered rush of the electric fervor. It crept up the left side, she held it, timed it, let it gather momentum, let it gather force; it escaped her above the hip-bone, spread, slightly weakened, up the backbone; at the nape, it broke, distilled radium into the head but did not burst out of the hair. She wanted the electric power to run on through her, then out, unimpeded by her mind.

•

The rhymes, the repetitions of the incantation, would hold the serpent power mounting in the work, to time it, “let it gather momentum, let it gather force.” In shaman rite and yoga rite men have come into heavens or crowns or nirvanas of a thought beyond thought, like the poet inspired, carried away by words until vision arises, as of the whole.

But this blowing one’s top or the Taoist ecstatic’s churning the milky way with his lion tongue is fearful. The snake in the spinal tree of life has made a nightmare of impending revelation for me, for he wears still the baleful head of the diamondback rattler, the hooded fascination of the king cobra. The Nagas that sway above the Buddha’s dreaming form keep my thought away from him.

For a moment this power, this would-be autistic force of the poem, glints forth in
The Walls Do Not Fall:
“or the erect king-cobra crest / to show how the worm turns” and then, where “we” refers to the poet-initiates:

So we reveal our status
with twin-horns, disk, erect serpent
,

“Walk carefully, speak politely,” she warns, for words conceal meanings, “in man’s very speech”—as in the world, “insignia”:

in the heron’s crest,
the asp’s back,

Is it to hide the serpent power that Helen, evoking Isis, in
Helen in Egypt
would “blacken her face like the prophetic
femme noire
of antiquity”?

How could I hide my eyes?

how could I veil my face?
with ash or charcoal from the embers?