The H.D. Book (43 page)

There were often times in childhood when, lying in the tall grass, the perspective of the world shifted so that this little scope became the eye’s universe and an ant or worm was hero or protagonist of that world; his journey along a leaf, over a stem, around a stone, became momentous. So that I would forget myself in the ant’s purposes or in the worm’s intent. That was one instance where one’s consciousness was transported to another world that was still this world.

The other, related perspective, was the one of H.D.’s poem, as the identity would come in dreams, where one
was
an ant or worm, living a life within a life, in a perspective of the ant’s “dragon world” within one’s own sensible human world. Though I am persuaded to the truth of Freud’s sexual analysis of the language of dreams and of our daily lives, as a poet I know that language has many such realms for the wave of life itself strives to speak in us, and from some parent cell drifting in the first seas, child of Ocean and of radiations from Sun or even from the stars beyond, a germ of animal sympathy has survived to find its life in me as a man. In some protomammal—mutation or conversion of a germinal form—all the yet-to-evolve possibilities of wolf, rabbit, elephant, or man lay hidden; we are co-expressions of the idea of the mammal, members of a “kingdom” as the biologists recognize. There may be then in the differentiated members an intuition of the undifferentiated potency in which we belong to a tree of living forms, and may dream in the tree of being not only ancestral entities but collateral entities.

There is the curious poetic tradition that Denis Saurat traces in
Gods
of the People
not only of other worlds but of other lives, not only of a divided mind but of a divided existence. What idea of reality lay back of Blake’s:

The Caterpillar on the Leaf
Repeats to thee thy Mother is grief,

Not only trance mediums made trips to other planets and stars but poets too practiced mental traveling “to the other side” of the waters as in Blake or to the other side of the interstellar abyss as in Victor Hugo’s
Contemplations.
Here Saurat traces a cosmos in which every being has many personalities—“each has other parts, elsewhere in space, elsewhere in time.” “A frowning thistle implores my stay,” Blake writes:

What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles or tears;
For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me
With my inward Eye ’tis an old Man grey;
With my outward a thistle across my way—

The great
Maya
of Indian thought seems to invade the West. But if
poiein
means to make, and poet is maker;
Maya,
Zimmer tells us, means to measure, to form, to build; the
maya
or illusion of the real is itself in Indian thought a great poetry. It is not out of order that in the poetic tradition of other cultures, even in England or France or in America, like concepts should appear. Victor Hugo in “Pleurs dans la nuit” hears a stone that he has kicked out of his way cry out:

I took Thebes in its ruin,
I saw Susa on its knees
I was Baal at Tyre! I was Scylla in Rome!

“So each man,” Saurat, gathering the idea from fairy tradition and poetic lights and also from folk-lore of unorthodox twentieth century Christianity, finds “is spread out in time and space, has parts of his being in the past, parts in the future, parts somewhere on earth, parts in the stars and in spiritual worlds parallel to this physical world.”

The ratio between the worm and the star, the identity taken in the mollusk or the wild-goose, may isolate H.D. from her contemporaries. Deeply as Ezra Pound drank at the fountain of Yeats’s occult lore, though in
The Cantos,
as in The War Trilogy, angelic powers appear and parts of the poet’s being are in the past, though the ant looms large in reflection, the poet’s identity does not become confused in the web of many incarnations. But this same confusion that isolates H.D. from her contemporaries unites her with the imagination of Blake and Victor Hugo.

As early as “Narthex” in 1928 we find a conversion in H.D.’s concept from the Greek one-dimension to the Venetian—“renaissance” Raymonde calls it. She practises a magic of warming and drifting identifications. “The sun would soon go suddenly but mites still swarmed within it . . . people . . . people . . . in the porches of the piazetta, in and out of the cathedral doorways. People swarmed and people drifted . . . ” “I want to be a great bee,” Raymonde thinks: “I want to crawl in and forget everything in this thing.” She sees Saint Mark’s Cathedral as a great flower.

Raymonde’s mind, it seems to her, rises out of confusion, out of hysteria, “a lily, rising on tall stem.” “Loss of identity is the gift of Venice,” she continues: “power to crawl, snail self up the surface of high window and creep half-hatched moth in among tenuous rootlets and dynamic deep earth feelers.” It is this experience that Raymonde cannot share with Gareth.

“I am the child of Gaia (Earth) and of starry Ouranos (Heaven),” so the Orphic initiate testified in the Underworld. H.D.’s “Earth” or mother was named Helen, was Helena or Greece then. And her father, the astronomer, was a master or keeper of the stars, Ouranos then. The stars had been there in the beginning for her, as her father’s study or property—her paternal inheritance. In the prose works of the middle period, 1925 to 1935, there is the Solomon’s Seal star of “Narthex” and the movie star of
The Usual Star,
but the stars of Heaven do not appear. In the poems the stars begin to come out—Narcissus in “Myrtle Bough” turns from his “chrysalis of steel and silver” and “who cast my silver-self afar” sees his own image in Hesperus:

for one star
rises above the sand-dunes,

one star lights
the pool above the marshes,

“Yourself in myself, / mirror for a star, / star for a mirror.” In “Myrtle Bough” the Greek theme is mixed with “the contents / of Assyrian phials,” with “dreams of Medes and Grecians.” The star cult enters H.D.’s poetry as it entered Greek culture, an invasion of Assyrian-Chaldean-Persian influences—“
the Median rites.
” In the “Stars wheel in purple” of “Let Zeus Record,” Hesperus, Aldebaran, Sirius, the Pleiades, and “Orion’s sapphires, luminous” appear; they are, we know, also actual lovers. “Take me home,” H.D. will sing in
The Walls Do Not Fall:

where we may greet individually
Sirius, Vega, Arcturus,

where these separate entities
are intimately concerned with us,

These now seem most surely to be the stars of an astrological cult, but we must remember too that “take me home” is “take me back.” That “anywhere / where stars blaze through clear air” can be London before the War, when that brilliant new constellation of poets appeared together briefly: Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, Marianne Moore; each separate entity intimately concerned with H.D. as none of them were so concerned later. And back of that “home,” the first home appears: it is the study of the father. In
Tribute to Freud
H.D. makes it clear that the study, the father’s room, of Professor Freud leads back to the study of Professor Doolittle. These great astral forces then of The War Trilogy:

where great stars pour down
their generating strength, Arcturus

or the sapphires of the Northern Crown;

are charged with the powers of living men.

[April 24th, 1963: In the dream I had gone to meet Jess at the country house or retreat of Muriel Rukeyser, but this Muriel Rukeyser was
another. Even in the dream I was troubled by the fact that I could not identify the woman, and now it seems to me, for Muriel Rukeyser in my mind has always impersonated the poetess, that the house in the dream may have been the retreat of the Poetess Herself. It was in a village on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a very English village with great trees, that had not changed since the earliest days of colonial America. This Pennsylvania home may have been H.D.’s Bethlehem, and then, because the stars come into the picture, it may be
the
Bethlehem too, for just before sleep I had been rereading her account of her father and mother in
Tribute to Freud.
Her mother, she tells us there, was a descendant of one of the original groups of the Unitas Fratrum, the Moravian Brotherhood, of Count Zinzendorf. The Moravians had settled in the New World, in the earliest days of colonial Pennsylvania.]

What returned to my thought as I began work this morning was the revelation of the stars. For the dream Muriel Rukeyser, the Poetess of the major arcana of my own dream-tarot, took us out to see the night sky. All the stars of the cosmos had come forth from the remotest regions into the visible. At first I was struck by the brilliance of Orion, but as I looked the field was crowded with stars, dense cells of images and then almost animal constellations of the night sky. It was as if we saw the whole over-populated species of Man, and in that congregation of the living and dead, the visible and the invisible members of the whole, we began to make out patterns of men, animal entities whose cells were living souls.

“We see these skies here,” the Poetess said, “because we are very close to the destruction of the world.”

III
.

In the middle ground of the panel, where men and gods mingle, under the stars and the fire, under fire (light and flame), what we see in the Heavens and what we see in terms of our evolutionary life (above and below) are dimensions now of something happening in a multiple image, like those revelations of one thing in another or mingling of images in Salvador Dalí’s dream paintings.

Where in the foreground of our Nature the life of the worm is enacted, suggesting in his cocoon a shroud, and in his metamorphosis a resurrection; in the middle-ground of our human Person, we are reminded that men, gods, wear winged and horned head-dresses:

      as the butterfly

antennae,

or the erect king-cobra crest
to show how the worm turns.

These images are rhymes and recall previous occurrences of the poem to the mind as echoes of sound do. There is, as there is a highly developed melody of syllables, a melody of figures in H.D.’s work. Neither rime nor image occurs as a device, to punctuate line-end or to enliven some convention in its keeping; but they are cells of the tissue of meaning and feeling itself. Blake’s Worm on the Leaf is now not only “thy Mother’s grief” but Pharaoh, Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt—two kingdoms or two natures or two minds, and will be, in verse XXXV of
The Walls Do Not Fall:

in the light of what went before,

“be ye wise . . . as serpents,” woven into one figure, a felt design in the poem that in turn transforms our sense of design in history where Blake, Pharaoh, and the cunning of the serpent that
The Zohar
tells us Jacob stole from Laban, enter in to a new continuum.

“Transformation aims at the continuum of all perceptions,” Robert Kelly writes in his “Notes on the Poetry of Images” (1960). “Percepts are from dreams or from waking, rise from the unconscious or from the retina of the awakened eye. Poetry, like dream reality, is the juncture of the experienced with the never experienced. Poetry, like waking reality, is the fulfillment of the imagined and the unimagined.” Then: “Poetry is not the art of relating word to word, but the
ACT
of relating word to percept, percept to percept, image to image until the continuum is achieved.” And: “The progression of images constitutes the fundamental rhythm of the poem.”

There is always reference to tapestry and painting—these images in
H.D.’s work are interwoven; the movement of the poem in time is parallel to an imagined movement of the eye over the surface of the larger picture in time. But the fusion of voice heard and image seen along the track of a moving, changing picture is more immediately related to the sound-track and the film of the newest “visual” art, the movie. The sequence of the poem in which in the opening “shots” we see first “rails” then “rails gone” then “guns” then the old town square, in fog, for there is “mist and mist-grey, no colour,” and the frame changes to reveal “Luxor bee, chick and hare” carved in stone writing. The transitions, the flash-backs, the movement of the eye from object to object to tell its story, the projection—all these aspects of H.D.’s art relate not only to the stream of consciousness or the free associations of her analysis with Freud in 1933 and 1934 but to the techniques of the cinema.

Answering
The Little Review
’s valedictory questionnaire in May 1929, H.D. wrote: “Just at the moment I am involved with pictures. We have almost finished a slight lyrical four reel little drama, done in and about the villages here, some of the village people and English friends. The work has been enchanting, never anything such fun and I myself have learned to use the small projector and spend literally hours alone here in my apartment, making the mountains and village streets and my own acquaintances reel past me in light and light and light. All the light within light fascinates me, ‘satisfies’ me, I feel like a cat playing with webs and webs of silver.” In this new art, contemporaneous with H.D.’s own lifetime, painting and tapestry could be recalled. H.D. sees the projection of the image as a web of silver, or is it the thread of film that she means? But “web” occurs again—it is not only what she most wants to do or know or be, it is also what she most fears: “I fear the being caught in any one set formula or set of circumstances, I fear poverty in that it might catch me up in some ugly web of the wrong sort of things and the wrong sort of attitudes. I fear people from the future who may ‘trap’ me.”

Between 1928 and 1930, Kenneth Macpherson, Bryher’s second husband, edited and published
Close Up,
“The Only Magazine Devoted to Films as an Art,” with Bryher as assistant editor. Old associates appear from the literary nexus of the early twenties—Gertrude Stein is there to contribute her avant-garde note, and Dorothy Richardson writes an elegiac to the silent film. But the writers in
Close Up
seem not to
be associated, as writers in
Des Imagistes, The Little Review, transition,
or
Exile,
were, with a common cause in a new art in writing; they suggest often the intimate amateur correspondence of a social “in-group.” “(Dear H.D. Pardon the theft)” Hay Chowl can write in quoting an article of H.D.’s. The “We have finished a slight lyrical four reel little drama” of H.D.’s reply to
The Little Review,
with “some of the village people and English friends” came as an account of how far she was from her old literary associations. The thought of Pound, Williams, or Lawrence is remote now; even the profession of poetry will not do when she is asked “What should you most like to do, to know, to be?” In this “Bryher” milieu new associations were forming however that will play their part in H.D.’s return in full to the profession of poetry in her last phase. When the London correspondent of
Close Up,
Robert Herring, later becomes editor of
Life and Letters Today
a new literary context appears. Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Richardson, and H.D. will be a familiar expectation; Bryher is an even more constant contributor; Edith Sitwell enters the picture (and there may be a common ground of magic and visionary prophetic mode between the later poetry of Edith Sitwell and H.D.’s War Trilogy); carried over from the impetus of
Close Up,
the art of film becomes a new department of
Life and Letters Today,
and more important, the genius of Eisenstein is brought into the new ground.