The H.D. Book (15 page)

Provence was laid waste, but out of the cult of its poets the
ars amatoria
went as a poetic tradition, from Toulouse to Palermo and Florence. In that tradition or teaching, Dante was to discover in his Beatrice a magic having to do with the vision of God; His Lady was to lead him until she drew him “Within the yellow of the eternal rose”
—Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna
—“which doth expand, rank upon rank, and reeketh perfume of praise unto the Sun that maketh spring for ever.” Such is the inspiration of Dante, and such his vision therein, that in
Commedia,
as in Saint Francis’s legend and his Canticle of Brother Sun, it almost seems as if the separation of and from Eros were to be healed.

Out of the Celtic world, in the twelfth century, from the extreme Western borderlands of Christendom, possibly first by a Welsh prince, Bledri ap Cadivor, who was, so Jessie Weston tells us, “
Latinarius
” or “translator” and who had come over to the Norman side from the pagan Welsh world, a story came over to the Christian side, a magic is translated into the content of a religion, and again, the Eros Without comes over into the Eros Within. Francesca, who whirls in the hellish storm of the Eros Without, tells Dante that she and Paolo were seduced by the enchantment of reading the story of Lancelot, seduced by Romance. The Celtic genius in a poetry that was not a rational melody but the weaving of a spell so intertwined and elaborated its figures that now we see the one Eros and now the Other, Within and Without dance in interchanging patterns. Which came first? the scholars still ask. Fertility cult, folk lore, or Christian mystery—however we read—the hallows, the Grail, the Lance that drips its blood into the Dish, the Wound, the Question that is not asked, the Lamenting Women that attend, are
feyrie, phanopoeia.
The sacra of the Church and the magic treasures of ancient kings, the sexual emblems and ritual objects of chthonic cults, have been stolen to furnish the changeling mysteries of a Romance in Poetry. They have become properties of an other stage that presents a play within the play.

Romance has appeared, and there may have been, in this, a new Eros. Not only the primal cosmic power, but also the Platonic ideal, the First Beloved, but also the most human god that Psyche sought in her quest, but also the Eros that Church fathers, Catholic and heretic, had named an evil, but also now the power of a cult that remains as a
mode in poetry. Eros had become a tradition of the poem. Garden and rose, bird and dawn, dew and paradise, are notes now of a melody that first troubadours sang.

I too may be Celtic, and a spell be felt to be necessary to the works here, for weaving
is
necessary as I go, to keep many threads and many figures so that every thread is central and every figure central to threads and figures, with none coming to its conclusion but leading further into the process. But in this return of the
erôtes
of the verso as active elements of our own time, we are heirs of work done in the first decades of this century. In
The Spirit of Romance
Pound related the tradition of Eros from Apuleius to “the consummation of it all in Dante’s glorification of Beatrice” and “the final evolution of Amor by Guido and Dante, a new and paganish god, neither Eros nor an angel of the Talmud.” The poetic tradition of the Grail was related to this tradition by Jessie Weston in two books,
The Quest for the Holy Grail
(1913) and
From Ritual to Romance
(1919). The cult of the gods as it is found in the Hellenizing poems of D. H. Lawrence, H.D., and Pound in the Imagist period cannot be separated from the reawakened sense of the meaning and reality of the gods as facts of human experience that we find in contemporary studies of the mystery cults, in Jane Harrison’s
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion
(1903) and
Themis
(1912), in Cook’s
Zeus
(1914), in the Orphic studies of Robert Eisler, and the Gnostic studies of G. R. S. Mead, whose lectures Pound attended in 1916 finding, as he tells us, “in the legend of Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre a prototype of chivalric love
.
” In scholarship as well as in poetry there is an insistence that the contemporary world must call up within itself the old gods, that there must be a return of the Underworld into this world. “I know, I mean, one man who understands Persephone and Demeter,” Pound writes in
The Spirit of Romance,
“and one who has, I should say, met Artemis. These things are for them
real.
” Edward Sapir, reviewing H.D.’s
Collected Poems
in 1925, saw rightly, beyond the question of Imagism, “the rediscovery of ancient and beautiful ways made apt once again for the hungering spirit
.
” Along these ways, Eros and Psyche come to reveal their meanings—here, now; there, then. “All ages are contemporaneous,” Pound proposed, but it was by the poetic genius that these terms were created—“all ages” and “the contemporaneous” are perspectives of time
that belong to the imagination.
The Spirit of Romance
was not a history of the actual past but an instruction in the nature of the high art that was to be contemporary poetry.

“Earth’s fallen kingdom contains its original face,” a fellow poet, M. C. Richards, writes in a poem that arrived today in a letter. “Dante found it in a dream,” H.D. writes in “The Guest” in 1946, a companion work to
The Spirit of Romance.
Where Pound had taken the story of the Spirit of Romance from what he calls “the phantom dawn” in Apuleius to the Latin Renaissance after Dante, H.D., “remembering Shakespeare always, but remembering him differently,” follows the proliferation of the Spirit in Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry. Theosophic insights lie back of Pound’s study; Freudian learning informs H.D.’s—but these poets bring us to see the theosophic and the psychoanalytic anew as hints of a primary poetic vision and experience that returns where it will in man’s history. Of certain men, Pound wrote, “their consciousness is
germinal.
”

Their thoughts are in them as the thought of the tree is in the seed, or in the grass, or the grain, or the blossom. And these minds are the more poetic, and they affect mind about them, and transmute it as the seed the earth . . . the strength of the Greek beauty rests in this, that it is ever at the interpretation of this vital universe, by its signs of gods and godly attendants and oreads.

This image of seed and influence, consciousness and germination, reappears in H.D.’s account of a Spirit of Romance brought into the ground of Poetry in England:

The lesser and the greater poet alike met in the unanimous acceptance of one article of faith . . . The dream was greater than reality. Out of it, they built a city, comparable to Augustine’s
City of God,
or a fortress as formidable as the
Castle
of Teresa. Francis himself might have learned much from the blossoms of Robert Herrick or the
lilies of all kinds
of that
Winter’s Tale.

The images of the poem, then, were not impressions translated from the given reality of the poet into words but were evocations of a dream
greater than reality, a New World coming into existence in the
opus
of the poem itself. In that New World an Old World reawakened. “The spiritual inheritance, substantially absorbed by Rome, was not lost,” H.D. tells us:

It had been carried, not in iron chests guarded by the vanguard of a conquering army, but it had blown on the wind, as the jongleur, the jester, the beggar wandered, himself suspect, from court to court. He gathered sometimes as he went, strange flowers, it is true, but the seeds of the faith, in the end, blown by the tempest or carried in the dowry-chest of the girl from the south, took root.

An exotic flower—it blossomed only in the queen’s tiring-room or later, in the king’s banquet-hall. Then it was hewn down. But the roots of that flower still flourished and sent out thorny branches.

The seed and the roots here are seed and roots of a poetic faith in which Eros and Poetry, Romance, Rite, and Lore, have become One in the Imagination. Poetry Itself becomes for the new heresy of Poetry a primary experience of the Divine Order. “An aristocracy of emotion,” Pound calls it in 1916—evolving “out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries.” “A Dream greater than Reality,” H.D. calls it in 1946. Whatever we are following here, it is not the heresy of Spirit against Matter or against the Incarnation—for in the Imagination, there is no contradiction between the Radiant Body and the actual physical body: the one is seen in the other, or imagined in the other. What we attend is the unification of visions of the world and its reality once held to be in conflict.

It is of the essence of Poetry that sexual rites, fertility rites, Christian rites, and Celtic rites, may be confused, transmuted in an alembic to yield the stuff of a poetic reality, until we cannot divide the magic from the religious ingredients. The ritual objects of the Grail romance are entirely properties of the Imagination. So H.D. traces in
The Guest
how in Shakespeare’s lifetime the imagination in the poetic theater took over into a higher reality the things of the church and the things of the court.

Henry VIII had ransacked the monasteries. “The church was plundered by the palace; the palace became the background for new ritual
.
”
In the masques and plays acted in the throne-room or the antechamber, the objects from the world of religion became stage properties. “Sumptuous plate and linen, looted from the Cardinal’s palace, was shared alike by Montague and Capulet. Juliet’s tomb was, no doubt, magnificently draped in violet. The candle-sticks recalled another canopy, another burial.” In the reality of actual life, Christendom and Kingdom both fell. But the “original face” remains, for just here, in the fall, Christendom and Kingdom fell into the Imagination. In the reality of what exists only as it is created in the Imagination, Christendom and Kingdom had begun.

That one image may recall another, finding depth in the resounding, is the secret of rhyme and measure. The time of a poem is felt as a recognition of return in vowel tone and in consonant formations, of pattern in the sequence of syllables, in stress and in pitch of a melody, of images and meanings. It resembles the time of a dream, for it is highly organized along lines of association and impulses of contrast toward the structure of the whole. The impulse of dream or poem is to provide a ground for some form beyond what we know, for feeling “greater than Reality.”

The first great era of Romance is born in the fictional civilization that follows the world conquest of Alexander, as the Hellenic becomes the Hellenistic in an empire of Orientalizing Greek and Hellenizing Orient that eventually has its capital in Rome. When again in the eighteenth century, the Western World would conquer India, the dream of Vishnu returns to infect the West, so that in the nineteenth century even in America, with Emerson and Whitman, the synthesizing Romanticism of a new world-mind is under way. And it is to this Romantic movement that Pound, H.D., and Lawrence, in the Imagist period, belonged. Essentially anti-modernist, in the Credo of 1912 with its insistence upon the ultimate reality of the image in itself and upon the magic of a cadence that corresponded with that image—what Pound called an “absolute rhythm”—the Imagists seek a return to Hellenic purity, even to the archaic Greek, in reaction to the theosophy and Hermeticism of the Symbolist movement typified by Yeats. But soon Pound with the neo-Platonism and light-gnosis of
The Cantos
and Lawrence with the sexual mysteries of his
Fantasia of the Unconscious
clearly have returned to the Hellenistic basis of
The Spirit of Romance.
And with a series of prose works—
The Hedgehog
(1925),
Palimpsest
(1925–26), the story “Narthex” (1927) which appeared in the
Second American Caravan,
and the novel
Hedylus
(1927)—H.D. makes her own full presentation of a commitment to Hellenistic syncretism.

Palimpsest,
the central work here, consists of three stories:

1. H
IPPARCHIA
. War Rome (circa 75
B.C
.)

2. M
UREX
. War and post-War London (circa 1916–1926
A.D
.)

3. S
ECRET
N
AME
. Excavator’s Egypt (circa 1925
A.D
.)

as they are presented in the table of contents.

She may have had in mind Flaubert’s
Trois Contes,
which had been a touchstone in Pound’s proposition of the new aesthetic, the new poetry was to measure up to the best in prose: “Flaubert is the archetype,” he writes in
ABC of Reading.
And earlier, in
How to Read:
“Flaubert, by force of architectonics, manages to attain an intensity comparable to that in Villon’s
Heaulmière,
or his prayer for his mother.” Like Flaubert’s
Trois Contes,
the three stories of H.D.’s
Palimpsest
present juxtapositions of the modern with ancient time. Like Flaubert’s Félicité and Julian, Hipparchia, Raymonde Ransome in “Murex,” and Helen Fairwood in “Secret Name,” are drawn to illustrate phases of ecstatic experience, the special psychologies of states of fever or abnormal apprehension. The story “Herodias” from
Trois Contes,
a modern critic writes, “justifies Hugo’s comment that Flaubert combined ‘the real, which exhibits life, with the ideal, which reveals the soul’.”

But the form of the whole in H.D.’s work was not only that of contrast and parallel between persons as in
Trois Contes.
The key was given in the title—
Palimpsest—
and underlined by H.D. in her subscript to the title: “i.e., a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make room for another.” Each of the three stories of H.D.’s
Palimpsest
presents a consciousness in which some underlying suppressed consciousness shows through, and, in turn, in each story the attentive reader will find traces or ghosts of the other stories—of Hipparchia in Raymonde or of Raymonde in Helen Fairwood.
Palimpsest
is a study in reincarnations.