The H.D. Book (82 page)

III
.

So we’ve to see H.D.’s “prompted by hunger, / it opens to the tide-flow” and the retraction that follows:

but infinity? no,
of nothing-too-much:

I sense my own limit,

as referring to the survival of identity in the growth and evolution of the poet’s mind, recapitulating the experience of those first cells of life in the primal waters. Some of those cells remained what they were, and they remain in our seas today, triumphs of species to adapt and survive. They escaped somehow from the magic, the pouring radiations of the stars that altered the code-script. They were not among the cells that came into the light and lost their selves in dream. For these other cells
that mutated towards new forms, that were to lose what they were, prompted by hunger, opened to the tide-flow of the stars. They died and were re-born, caught in the alembic under the radioactive rays, they were flooded with what we call longing. Their inner order was disturbed, re-arranged, altered. Burned to a clinker in the sun-spot—that was the greatest chance—or enlightened.

•

This is the deeper sense, the life-force sense, of H.D.’s opening passages in
The Walls Do Not Fall.
Thinking of all the mutations in spirit, of the waste of millions in the process, we may read with new meaning:

O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by one,

for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,

for theirs is the hunger
for Paradise.

It is a theosophical poem, and theosophy, whether Hellenistic or Victorian, takes thought not from dogma but from speculations upon the nature of the cosmos as a divine revelation. Back of such thought is a concept of universal sympathies, correspondences, communications; the imagination of the whole of What Is as an experiencing entity. So that for the theosophical mind, even where Darwin’s acausal evolution is accepted, evolution, the evolution of forms, is an experience. “The universe is one animal connected and contained by one life,” Proclus argues in his
Commentary on Plato’s “Timaeus”:
“For if this life were not common, there would not be a sympathy of the parts in it. For sympathy is effected through a participation of the same nature.”

So the vision of the trilogy that sees history as the evolution of psychic forms sees the physical universe as vital:

where great stars pour down
their generating strength, Arcturus

or the sapphires of the Northern Crown.

•

But now let us see the “prompted by hunger, / it opens to the tide-flow” as referring to the poetic consciousness itself. The tide-flow of the poem’s own compelling measures where rhymes and ratios have a felt relation to the sympathies within the total cosmos. Carlyle’s sense that the heart of things is musical is of this order. The poem, H.D. would say, is generated just here, between the hunger—the opening of the organism to take in the world around it—and the sense of limits. Just this, she says, I could digest, incorporate, bring into my survival. The imagination might go beyond, but the biological reality is again and again asserted: “I am what I am” plays in counterpoint to a vision in which life is characterized not only by the limits of species but by the generation of new forms. “The Presence,” then, of
The Walls Do Not Fall
xiii, “ultimate blue ray, / rare as radium,” identified with the new Master over Love, may be rightly related to what we understand of the role mutation plays in the evolution of life-forms.

•

In the small-town integrity of John Crowe Ransom as he protests against Dante’s
Divine Comedy
the sense of limits is all, the preservation from evolution of life-forms. For such an entity, holding its own in the constant danger of being lost in larger more complex forms, the battle against pathetic fallacy is a kind of magic to keep back the flood of sympathies. My mind returns to the cells that came into the dangerous currents of the light and were changed. Some of us dream of such a light and are even infatuated with the thought. So Proclus quotes from Orphic texts:

The Gods admir’d, in ether when they saw
A light unlook’d for, bursting on the view,
From the immortal Phanes’ glittering skin.

But we seem to have remembered too in the morphology of our psyche a panic, as if there could be a withdrawal from being taken over so, we seem to recapitulate some knowledge of the alternative in which millions of cells survived without being changed. “I am hurt by the glare,” Ransom tells us, “even in imagination my eyes cannot take it.” He is talking about the imagined glare of Dante’s vision of God.

Touched by the disturbances that make for poetry, Ransom prayed from the beginning for protection against them. “Two evils, monstrous either one apart,” he tells us in “Winter Remembered,” “possessed me, and were long and loath at going.”

Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat and center.

•

It is as if, in our phantasy of cells quickened in the primal seas by the light, some of them resisted the knowledge and could escape the rule of sympathies. A man could be touched by the genius of Poetry as Ransom was and then emerge magnificently free from the ravages of inspiration in what he would call his “proper heat and center.” Finally the disease of poetry left Ransom’s spiritual body, and he ceased having poems in his mind. He could almost be at ease with his friend Brooks who had never lost his proper center. But we know Ransom had seen something in the light Plato saw by, for he tells us “I am hurt by the glare,” and we know that he glowed in the fire of sympathetic fallacy, for he tells us not to think so. The physical sensation remains.

•

The planetary regents of
Tribute to the Angels
are not only figures reviving the lore of an old tradition in the drama of the present, but they are evoked as ministers of inner sympathies. The planets are influences—we have only to think of how interdependent those orbits and gravities are with our own terrestrial order in the solar system. And men, taking the wandering lights of the planets as elements of their thought, of their sky map and their cosmic imagination, have made them symbolic influences.

But H.D. is thinking of them, too, as star-beings, active intelligences. She returns again and again to the prayer for inspiration, for the “power between us” to inform the poem, just as Ransom turned his mind against the possibility of such identifications or projections. In
her early childhood she had heard their names—Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. “Venus is very beautiful tonight,” her father, Charles Doolittle of the Flower Observatory, would report. The planets were persons of her father’s mysteries before they were persons of Greek myth. In time, in a lifetime of study, the divine powers of the ancient world would become more and more real in H.D.’s world, most particularly in their late Hellenistic syntheses, where astral cult and chthonic cult had merged with the poetry of what Festugière in
La Révélation d’Hermès Trismégiste
calls
les fictions littéraires.
“I say
fictions,
” the Roman Catholic scholar writes, “because, for us, moderns, it is evident that the Hellenistic accounts of revelation carry no inner meaning of truth.” So, too, we remember from Freud’s
Future of an Illusion
when asked by his son who had a peculiarly marked sense of reality if a fairy tale were a true story, Freud replies, no.

But for H.D., as for the Romantics before her, for the masters of Rosicrucian and Hermetic romances in the Renaissance, or for the theosophists out of the Hellenistic period, the fairy tale could communicate the deepest truth. In
The Hedgehog
she tells us: “Bett made Madge understand that the stories weren’t just stories, but that there was something in them like the light in the lamp that isn’t the lamp. Bett would say to Madge, when she was a very little girl, ‘Now what is the lamp side of the story and what is the light side of the story?’ so Madge could see very easily (when she was a very little girl) that the very beautiful stories Bett told her, that were real stories, had double sorts of meanings.” By the time of The War Trilogy, not only the stories of the old gods, but the great Hellenistic literary fictions of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, and the Gnostic gospels had come into H.D.’s realm of real stories and of double sorts of meaning.

At the same time, as we have traced in charade and
roman à clef,
H.D.’s life became more and more a story of her life. In the earliest poems, those close to her—Pound, Aldington, Lawrence, Bryher—were projected as persons of story and drama, and beyond these, as mythological persons. Life itself had double sorts of meanings. Did the flowering tree of The War Trilogy actually appear to her? In
The Walls Do Not Fall
v, she tells us that the track of the story will lead “from a plum-tree in flower / to a half-open hut-door” and in xxvi and xxvii she asks “of all
the flowering of the wood” what flowering tree is to be our store. This is clearly the preparation of a fiction. In her notes to
Ion
she brought in the story of the burnt olive-tree of Pallas Athené, sending out a new shoot of frail silver life. “Pallas Athené, then, was not dead. Her spirit spoke quietly, a very simple message.” The revival of the burnt out tree was an old theme of H.D.’s fiction.

Yet in
Tribute to the Angels,
her testimony comes with the verity of the actual, an event long awaited, long prepared. The fictional depth and the actual figure contend so that, as she tells us, we do not know whether “we were there or not-there,” but:

we saw the tree flowering;

it was an ordinary tree
in an old garden-square.

So, too, the dream-visitation of the Christ in
The Walls Do Not Fall
and of the Lady in
Tribute to the Angels
I take it are actual dreams. But just beyond, creatures of shadow and light, actuality and fiction, delusion and illusion, are the angelic beings. What we are forced to recognize is that she actually felt their presence. Ecstatic in the tide-flow she opened her mind to the invasion of the imagination. “Then came the break-through of astral forms, a streaming down into this landscape, where Bosch’s vision and my own San Francisco were already mingled, of another world. . . . ”

•

“More than a little silly,” Jarrell wrote of H.D.’s critical vulnerability. Back of that word “silly” I find the sense in earlier meanings:
Seely,
“blissful, holy; innocent, harmless; deserving of pity, helpless, defenceless; often of the soul, as in danger of divine judgment; frail, worn-out, crazy; foolish.”
Silly,
from: “deserving of compassion” to “feeble, insignificant; sorry; unsophisticated; feeble-minded; empty-headed; stunned, dazed as by a blow.” As late as the fifteenth century, in the mind of Medieval Christendom, it had meant happiness; “said of persons, their condition or experiences” when blessed by God. For the sophisticated mind of the Age of Reason it meant what was most contemned.

The silly condition of the open soul was that there must have been so many freaks, frail worn-out crazy rebirths; so many deaths of meaning, relapses into chaotic matter; so many ecstatic explosions in the alembic. We sense it in the course of human genius. The fact of the risk of inspiration is recognized in the common sense of “touched.” Where men have vision and courage for the experience of life itself, even where it exceeds the uses of understanding, beyond the preservation of the species,
silly
could mean blissful, and it was deserving of compassion, for it meant too to go in peril of the soul.

•

The landscape of the dream may be thought of, as I have thought of H.D.’s poem, as the alembic where radiant powers move. The incandescence is the sun-spot, the tender-spot, the conjunction of the script and the fire. Just here what we are not begins to take life in Us. “We have no map,” H.D. writes in the closing lines of
The Walls Do Not Fall.
On the biological level, in Darwinian terms, the whole intricately evolved pattern of those who survive gives no map that will tell us the fate of man, for the orders of the living are inbound and informed by the orders of the cosmos that men call chaos or chance. “Possibly we will reach haven, / heaven,” is the only resolution of the longing in us towards what is not ourselves but belongs to the current of possibilities in evolution. This “we” is no longer at liberty but serves the purpose that H.D. calls “
Paradise
” in The War Trilogy. “The seal of the jar was un-broken.” Yes, and Kaspar was most aware of his cause, his proper heat and center. But, “no secret was safe with a woman.”

•

Italicizing, H.D. draws into correspondence the two utterances: “
for many waters can not quench love’s fire
” and:

but to an outcast and a vagabond,
to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.

There is a love in which we are outcast and vagabond from what we are that we call “falling in love.” It appears an evil or a power over us, and can seize us, sweeping from us all sense of who we are. We know it
as the cells must have known the first magic rays, as pain, as longing, as loss, as ecstasy; for we are estranged from ourselves in this love or light, and something evolves.

Where we preserve ourselves, ripening into our own forms or species, we must often pray against this “falling in love,” the imperative that might carry us beyond ourselves. For there is the other love we know, the domestic and kindly love for what we are, our daily practice of love. In the highest vision they are one, but in the individual heart that enters the changes towards the higher vision so that “falling in love” may belong to the things we love, the changes are fearful.

It was this “falling in love,” if we read Ransom’s “Winter Remembered” rightly, that was Ransom’s time of knowing the hurt or light or inspiration that made him begin his struggle to reduce Poetry to a domestic art. There was: