The H.D. Book (40 page)

“Did you ever think how much in this back to nature thing you were at one with the common view?”—with all those free thinkers of the working class and lower middle class, I was thinking, sun-tanned, sunburnt—Nudists?—followers of a popular theosophy and nature-worship. “ ‘Bright Messenger’—did you read that?” I wanted to tell her how close at first H.D. was to the world of “The Centaur” or “The Education of Uncle Paul.” Vaud,
her
Vaud, had been the place too of Algernon Blackwood’s revelations of wind and fire gods. But now I was going to lose it again. There may have been a wave of not wanting to lose her.

We sat out-of-doors in an arbor under grape-vines, it was another time now, some revenant-time of my adolescence in the San Joaquin. “Fletcher talked in his review of your poetry about Plotinus, Proclus, Boehme,” I went on, trying to recall the conspiracy between H.D., and the old H.D. with her love for theosophy, and my own goings-on, going-too-far: “Didn’t you talk way back then in London about the great image, the eidolon?”

“There was a book . . . ” she said, and now I was going to lose her I felt again, she was so near, there was a smile with it: “There was a book we all read,” she smiled, and I saw again the glint of her playful, affectionate conspiracy. There were times in our interview when I’d been painfully aware of how mistaken I was, how little she liked my digging, digging, digging at Raymonde Ransome. Wasn’t she tired, barely tolerant of my book. “Why don’t you write a book about your own affairs?” she had asked me at one point; there could have been a
barbed impatience in that. But we did talk about writing then and I did not take up the barb if it was there. “I’ve had a book on my mind—” I said, looking off into the distant possibility myself but just missing it, “But it’s lost.” Had her question been almost an angry reproof, a rebuff? She meant, that’s what I saw when she asked, a book of my own sexual engagements, a series of those I had fallen in love with.
Back to nature.

“There was a book we all read . . . ” she had disclosed. As I woke the name of the author was there and her last curious smile—“taunt” the word came to me yesterday as I was walking back from the mailbox at the corner; I have to work in “the furies’
taunt
” I had thought.—Was that in Helen?

“E. Nesbit Trilby was the author’s name,” she had said, and then: “It was a silly novel of high society, I’m afraid.”]

II
.

All given things have a command over the artist; thoughts come to the poet, images are presented not invented; and where there is poetry we see chance as a donation, the universe as a donor. Chosen most gifted, inspired. In French,
La donnée
is the
idée fondamentale d’un ouvrage d’esprit.
The poem itself is a gift in exchange. In these stories and poems of the middle period, H.D. seeks to give herself, a feudal token for a holding, the inner even confused, even painful, account to overlords of love and loyalty. Not only Gareth but Daniel is donor; his the narthex, the initiatory love-death. Not only Gareth and Daniel but the persona Ray Bart and the descending triangle with Katherine and Mordant give the star.

To pay back, to get even, here is transmuted in the return of truth; for the scales of the artist are not only a balance that Thoth holds but they are also the scales of a music, the series of proportions in a drawing from life. In the language we are given there is the Old Norse donation,
skál,
a bowl, the bowls of the scale; there is the Latin donation
scãla,
a ladder, the ladder of ascending or descending tones, the graduations that give measure; the Jacob’s Ladder as Denise Levertov evokes it in that poem:

The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels’ feet that only glance in their tread, and need not
touch the stone.

It is of stone.

Given, these ascents and descents of spirit, even the rosy glow of the stone:

only because behind it the sky is a doubtful, a doubting
night gray,

by the actual so that “a man climbing”

must scrape his knees, and bring
the grip of his hands into play. The cut stone
consoles his groping feet.

It is the cut of the stone, the scrape of reality that verifies the spirit. The night gray, the roughness of the way gives verity, and the artist seeks it out, for his work is not only a gift for like-souls, for the human donors before and after, but a gift for the sky, a gift for the very hazard in which experience has had its keen edge.

“When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream”; George MacDonald writes in
Lilith:
“when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.”

Where we see certain things in the poem that “appear there” as Donna Anna who is also something else (“Naturally, I have sung you. I am your melodies”) appears in Hoffmann’s
Don Juan;
as the Lamb appears in Van Eyck’s great altarpiece, but also in the rites of the Fleece, so that He is not only Christ the Lamb or the God-Fleece that the Argonauts sought, but also the artist’s theme, we are aware not only of the artist but of another. The work of art itself appears as a gift for another but also as a means for another to be there. Self expression may be an urgency of art, but the self has no expression except in this other.

In
Tribute to the Angels:
“it was an ordinary tree / in an old garden-square.”
It is only a half-burnt-out-tree, a survivor of the war; it is also the other half the tree in its flowering; the whole recalling then the Solomon’s seal of “Narthex”: the half-burnt-out triangle of those before the War and the bright triangle of those after the War—the two are needed to make the design. A
donnée
of the poem: “we saw the tree flowering,” in order to see. The tree itself bestows the fundamental idea of
Tribute to the Angels,
but in turn it comes as an answer to a prayer or a question, the “is this union at last?” of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
that may ask union with God or the universe or the union of all the gifts of the poet in her opus. In the creation of a melody there is a given passage of tones that lead towards another phrase or phase to which they belong. Melody arises in the union of otherwise diverse feelings.

Invoking angelic powers in the opening pages of her
Tribute,
H.D. establishes a scale or rather a series of scales: the Judaic and the Greek divine orders are two that in the Christian scale become one; the Christian, the New Dispensation, and the Egyptian, the old Heretical Tradition, are two that in turn in the psychoanalytic and theosophical interpretation become one. What is involved here is a polyphony, proceeding from the choral mode of her earliest work out of Euripides, a formal counterpart of the polyvalence of elements in H.D.’s life-feeling. The poem must find its mode in dimensions that allow for angels to occur as they allow for the worm on the leaf and the star, for shapers and donors outside the person of the poet herself to come into the work. For she, like E. T. A. Hoffmann, yearned for some signal from the unknown. A presentation from the unconscious? But these presents come from outside the signature of H.D.; the leaf, the sea, the shell, the tree in flower come from the actual, natural world; Thoth,
Amen,
Raphael, Annael, Christos, and the Lady come from the lore-world of other men; and the poem itself unfolds before the poet from the rhymes and developments given in the words from the increment of human experience the poet comes to know in the language, from other experience in which her experience comes true. It is in consciousness that the exchange is made; the gift comes into our own consciousness from an other consciousness. The sky, the wave, the blade of grass are elements of writing because they are elements of our conscious life.

The War itself gave proportion to personal feelings of being lost,
of surviving, and yet of braving circumstance, of holding to the ideal. The “I do not know why,” “we are powerless,” “our bodies blunder,” “we know no rule / of procedure,” “we have no map” reiterates the old Alexandrian mood H.D. knew in her first phase—the Failure of Nerves Gilbert Murray had called the Alexandrian phase in history—but it also is a realistic sense of the human lot at large in the Second World War and after. It is also the statement of the artist’s working terms. Form for H.D. “hewn from within by that craftsman” is the shell of organic experience; the work is a territory between the master-mason, her entity, and the oceanic life in which it takes its life. Defined by the tide-flow.

Did
The Walls Do Not Fall
at first seem to her to be complete in itself? The scholar may someday find that:

His, the track in the sand
from a plum-tree in flower

to a half-open hut-door,

is a track that leads to some image in the old lore; it may be an actual track seen in Egypt, in “
Karnak
1923.” The scholar may never find the track, “or track would have been” H.D. calls it:

but wind blows sand-prints from the sand,
whether seen or unseen):

but when it comes in
Tribute to the Angels
there is no “half-open hut-door”:

we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a frame—doorless—

and the tree is an apple tree not a plum.

Tribute to the Angels
is placed and dated:
London, May 17–31, 1944;
and
The Flowering of the Rod: London, December 18–31, 1944. The Walls Do Not Fall,
published in 1944, has only the “
from London 1942
” of the dedication to indicate when it was written. There must have been a time in which
The Walls Do Not Fall
stood alone.

These three books were never given a common title by H.D. “The War Trilogy” I call it, and I find now others too came to use that designation.
Yet they are three panels of a triptych, related when they are complete to the three panels of an altarpiece: on the left the desolation of the war, center the revelation of the angels and the flowering tree in the midst of a last judgment, and on the right the three kings, the poet herself as Magdalene, and the Child Redeemer. The otherwise incidental image of the flowering tree and the lore of:

His, the Genius in the jar
which the Fisherman finds,

from Lang’s collections of fairy tales which H.D. read again in the War years, and the:

He is Mage,
bringing myrrh.

appear to be enrichments in detail in the
Walls,
are taken up into the center of the design in
Tribute to the Angels
and
The Flowering of the Rod,
as the possibility of his name Amadeus gives Hoffmann the thread of his identity in his story
Don Juan.
What seemed incidental proves to be the key to the realization of a larger picture.

“Invention presupposed imagination,” Stravinsky says in his
Poetics of Music,
“but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actual being worked out. Thus, what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather creative imagination: the faculty that helps us to pass from the level of conception to the level of realization.”

I must have come across the definition before, that poetry, from the verb
poiein,
meant
to make,
but it was in Stravinsky’s book that the statement got across, and that poetics is “the study of work to be done.” To make things happen. And my idea of melody I found most clearly expressed there too in 1948, that “Melody,
Mélôdia
in Greek, is the intonation of the
melos,
which signifies a fragment, a part of a phrase,” for that year, working on “The Venice Poem,” I had begun
to follow the lead of the immediate particular towards an open invention. “Watch the duration of syllables, the tone leading of vowels,” Pound had instructed. Later, in 1950, in Olson’s “Projective Verse” this importance of the
melos,
the immediate factor, was reiterated: “Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable,” he proposed—let the syllable “lead the harmony on.” “To step back here to this place of the elements and minims of language, is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical. For from the root out, from all over the place, the syllable comes, the figures of, the dance.”

We made in a poem a place for the syllable to occur as it did not occur in the careless rush of speech. The damnation of systematic rime was like the damnation of systematic thought for it was careless of the variety of what was actually going on, the lead one sensed in incident, in factors so immediate they seemed chance or accident to all but the formal eye.

A place was made in the midst of the war for an epiphany to occur. The art in poetry is this art. She made up her mind to see the tree. She made a place for the tree. For this tree that was suddenly there, to be no mere tree but more, to be an occasion of
the
tree, to be just the incidental half-burnt-out apple tree it was.

Prayer, rite, taking thought—these prepare a place for a happening. “Listening for the syllables must be so constant and so scrupulous,” Olson writes, “the exaction must be so complete, that the assurance of the ear is purchased at the highest—40 hour a day—price.” Atheists and skeptics are right when they say that God is only an occurrence along the line of some human projection; that, otherwise, reasonably, there are no gods, is no God. Rhyme too is a creature of our constant practice and attention. That it was “made-up” meant, so we were told when we were children, that it was a lie in some way. Then there was: if you make up your mind, you can do it. It will come true.

In Cocteau’s film
Orpheus
the guardian angel Heurtebise tells Orpheus not to try to understand but to follow. It is a law in the reading of poetry that is a law too in the writing. Unless we follow, unless we follow thru the work to be done, there is no other way of understanding. Participation is all.