The H.D. Book (49 page)

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H.D. cannot arbitrate but must follow the inspiration (the in-breathing) and the beat, as she follows the feel and balance of the poem, for she works, having all the predisposition of her previous thought, towards the discovery of the whole. She works, as in analysis, to bring the content from latency into awareness. History here consists of “incidents” or parts of something in process, and the work of the poet is to find or render what is happening. Natural history is an evolution. The design unfolds, self-creative. Her sense of affinity with the shell-fish as “master-mason” (pathetic fallacy to the critic who does not believe there is a continuity of spirit in the universe) is morphological. She is concerned with a correspondence that is also, if we believe in evolution as life creating itself, where self is spirit, a sense of psychic origin.

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In xxxviii of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
the poet’s mind operates in a field of human mind, again as a thread weaves in a tapestry:

my mind (yours),

your way of thought (mine),

each has its peculiar intricate map,
threads weave over and under

the jungle-growth
of biological aptitudes,

inherited tendencies,
the intellectual effort

of the whole race . . .

Each mind has its “peculiar ego-centric / personal approach / to the eternal realities” and “differs from every other / in minute particulars,” “as the vein-paths on any leaf,” as each line in the poem has its “approach” and must be perfected there, having that imperfection that it is perfected only in the field of its existence, which it experiences as “approach” or “intention.” H.D.’s “eternal realities” I would see here as figures in a design to which any individual life contributes. The germinal form of Man in which we individuate and out of which we are each the immediate occasion of our species is such a figure, “of the whole race.” Here she draws upon the biological identity, as in
The Flowering of the Rod,
ix, she affirms:

No poetic fantasy
but a biological reality,

a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plant

or sea-plant cell . . .

where “poetic fantasy,” with its connotation of being made up for fancy’s sake, is not the poet’s term but her interior adversary’s, not then that poetic phantasy in Ficino’s terms identified with the creative imagination, for the tenor of The War Trilogy is that Dream and Life are one—the “spiritual realities” and “eternal realities” are “biological.” It is not only the figure of Man then out of which and to which the individual thread has its weaving of intention, but, beyond Man, in the larger field of Life itself, so that the poet strives for organic form as Life
form. This is not a humanist art. The “whole race” is ultimately not the species Man but the race of the living.

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With Olson’s “Projective Verse” the field of the imagination was extended to a form that took its imperative in the atomic particular or the cell. The energy of the poem he saw had its spring in the immediate event: “Let’s start from the smallest particle of all, the syllable.” There is a change then possible that haunts our minds since Olson’s charge—that the formal imperative or intent has its spring back of the word or phrase (back of that civilization of meanings agreed upon that the dictionary represents) in the minim of our speech, the immediate sounding event.

In this minim, in our articulation of vowels, lies the crucial evolutionary fact underlying the word. Speech, our specifically human instrument, is a possibility that arose with the separation of larynx and soft palate. “Specialization, semanticity, arbitrariness,” these functions of language we share with all primates; “discreteness,” “traditional transmission,” with our fellow anthropoids; but with the play of vowel color, we have our own music, giving rise to new qualities in speech: “displacement,” “productivity,” “duality of patterning,” the operations of our natural imagination in which sound makes sense. (See Charles D. Hockett, “The Origins of Speech,”
Scientific American,
September 1960.)

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So, I see
The Walls Do Not Fall
develop along lines of an intuited “reality” that is also a melody of vowel tone and rime giving rise to image and mythos and, out of the community of meanings, returning to themes towards its individual close. In her work she consciously follows the lead of image to image, of line to line, or of word to word, which takes her to the brink (as “gone” leads to “guns” in the opening of the poem) of meaning, the poet establishing lines of free (i.e., individual) association within the society of conventional meanings. The form of the poem, of the whole, is an entity or life-time—a “biological reality”—having life as her own body has life.

II
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The “Heart” in our projection of the tapestry of the poem appears as the brotherhood of scribes or initiates of Thoth. They belong to, have given their allegiance to, the truth or the heart of things. In the City Under Fire of parts i, ii, ix, x, xi, xii, xiv, xxiv, xxix, xxxiv, and the closing xliii of
The Walls Do Not Fall,
the heart is on trial. As in the code-script involving all the future development of the poem, there appears the accusation that the City makes against the poet:

your heart, moreover
is a dead canker,

they continue, and
your rhythm is the devil’s hymn,

It is “Isis, Aset or Astarte” who is accused here; the sexual lure and seductiveness of the poet in her service or her cult—the cult of the love affair, the affair of the heart, the cultivation of heart-ache, heart-consciousness, or passion over mind-consciousness or reason. The theme in
The Walls Do Not Fall
of giving thanks for recovery or survival in a time of war (on this level, a prayer during an air raid) is in turn a thanks for recovery, as in
Tribute to the Angels:

where, Zadkiel, we pause to give
thanks that we rise again from death and live.

from a heart-attack, consciously or unconsciously included in the statement. In “Narthex” the sign—“triangle set on triangle that makes a star, the seal of Solomon”—is the heart, where the triangle of an old affair—“Katherine-Mordant-Raymonde”—is “burnt out,” “residue of suffering” kept or learned by heart, we say. The “half-burnt-out apple-tree / blossoming,” the epiphany of
Tribute to the Angels,
may be the heart (the “tree” of arteries and veins) recovering. It was, she tells us, “the spear / that pierces the heart.”

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The attack, the being under fire, is an old theme of H.D.’s. In “Halcyon” from
Red Roses for Bronze
of 1931:

“tinsel” they said the other lives were,
all those I loved,
I was forgot;

what is most the heart of the matter for the “I” comes under the attack of others as irrelevant. In “The Tribute” of 1916: “till our heart’s shell was reft / with the shrill notes,” Beauty and love are the causes of an exile. In The War Trilogy thirty years later, the “we” who are under attack are devotees of beauty and of a heresy of love; the art of writing, the “script, letters, palette,” is itself under attack as tinsel. The actual war, the incendiary attacks, the deprivations, come to illustrate or manifest another war the lover and poet knew under attack, to reactivate the violence felt in the critical and social rejection of her person and her art that H.D. had known. But these voices that accuse have been brought over into the authority of the poem; they are voices of the poetic consciousness itself. The adversary is heart-felt.

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Returning to the City or Heart under “Apocryphal fire,” in
The Walls Do Not Fall,
i, we see it clearly: “the heart burnt out, dead ember, / tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered, / yet the frame held.” This “death” of the physical heart and its “resurrection” in the opening poem lead forward to the poet’s taking heart in the Christos or taking love in the Lover, as, in turn, we recognize her “New Master over Love” in the blossoming of the tree, in which the flowering of the rood returns, itself the news of a Vita Nuova from the Cross. So, too, the City burning gives us leads: we see Sodom, or Pompeii with its House of the Dionysian Mysteries, some city of Astarte, Carthage the burned and salted ground (or, as in
Helen in Egypt,
Troy thrown down, the City, like the Woman, “hated of all Greece”). It is a scene like that shown in the
Lot and His Daughters,
attributed to Lucas van Leyden, or in the visionary canvasses of Bosch or Brueghel, where the City is inflamed, from the crusade against the Cathars of Provence, where at
Béziers the Pope’s armies turned the cathedral of Saint-Nazaire into a great oven in which the faithful were burned, to the raging wars that swept Christendom in the seventeenth century where Protestant and Catholic sought to exterminate each other, the heart of the Christian reality—the City of God—was inflamed and burned out.

Or the scene is from Bosch’s
Garden of Delights
(or, as Wilhelm Fränger argues it should be titled—
The Millennium
), where in the right-hand panel we see those who dwell in the wrath of God, in the volcano of His inner agony. It is Jehovah’s realm, before Christ, the intestines of the Burning Mountain. The “we” of H.D.’s poem, who cry:

Dev-ill was after us,
tricked up like Jehovah;

have seen the Bad Father, and live in the world as if in the wrath of the last days. Where we cannot identify with the will of powerful groups in the society we live in, we feel their power over us as an
evil.
The word evil, as the O.E.D. suggests, “usually referred to the root of
up, over,
” may then be whatever power over us of outer or inner compulsion. As the power and presumption of authority by the State has increased in every nation, we are ill with it, for it surrounds us and, where it does not openly conscript, seeks by advertising, by education, by dogma, or by terror, to seduce, enthrall, mould, command, or coerce our inner will or conscience or inspiration to its own uses. Like the pious Essenes alienated from Romanizing priests and civilizing Empire alike, like the Adamite cult to which Bosch may have belonged—the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit—alienated from the spiritual authoritarianism of the Church and from the laws of warring feudal lords and principalities, we too may find ourselves, at odds with the powers that be, members of a hidden community, surviving not in history but in the imagination or faith. Like Jews paying taxes to Caesar or like little children suffering under the tyranny of powerful adults, we then live in a world that is “theirs,” in “their” power, in which a deeper reality, our own, is imprisoned. Our life is hidden in our hearts, a secret allegiance, at odds with the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and the true kingdom is “not of this World.” The artist—the poet as well as the painter or musician—striving
to keep alive the reality of his art as revelation and inspiration of Truth or Beauty finds himself so at odds with the dominant motives of profit and industry embodied in the society. For Communist and Capitalist alike the work of art is taken to be a commodity of social exchange. Not only gnostics and pacifists but artists and poets, those who live by an inner reality or world, having a prior adherence to the heart’s truth or wish, appear as heretics or traitors to those who lead or conform to the dominations of the day.

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In “The Tribute,” the City, stricken by war, has already been betrayed “for a thrust of a sword, / for a piece of thin money” and the gods have been driven out, except for War, and this Mars has “treacherous feet.” In “Cities” of 1914, H.D. had seen, “hideous first, hideous now,” the hive of a “new” or false city crowd out all vestige of the old beauty, with only a few left to cherish what once was and to await the coming of beauty again, like a heart that has lost love and waits, alienated, for its return.

As the poet Rilke saw the poets as bees storing the honey of the invisible in a time when, from the center of the commodity-culture, “there come crowding over from America empty, indifferent things, pseudo-things,
Dummy-life,
” so H.D. sees the City as a hive where the few remnants keep “grains of honey” and there appears a mass-people of the new age, larvae spreading “not honey but seething life.” “We are perhaps the last to have still known such things,” Rilke writes to von Hulewicz in 1925. “We would feed forever / on the amber honeycomb / of your remembered greeting,” H.D. reiterates in
The Walls Do Not Fall
in 1942:

but the old-self,

still half at-home in the world,
cries out in anger . . .

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The surrender of this-worldly purposes so important in religious conversion, and the separation of desire from passion into its own pure kingdom,
so important in the conversion of lovers to love: these are like the conversion of outer and inner reality to form a poetic real. Outer and inner conflicts enter into and surcharge the poetic. At odds with powerful influences, whether they be his own impulses or the opposing will of other men, the poet holds the new reality only by a heightened intensity. Realizations come not as charming experiences but as rare gains in reality, as raptures. The “honey” Rilke and H.D. speak of is such “rapture,” the secretion of the life experience of a besieged spirit, part then of a complex that includes the other features we find in apocalyptic statement—anger, outrage, despair, fear, judgment. The flaming cities are not only representations of persecutions suffered or punishments anticipated in heresy, they are also representations of a revenging wrath projected by the heretic, the stored-up sense of injustice and of evil dominations raging outward. Within the picture painted or raised in the poem, as in the individual psyche and in the society at large, we see the same symptoms. Everywhere, we find at every level the content felt as psychic is manifest. The individual psyche lives in the psychic society, as the individual physical body lives in the physical City. The artist then is not only psychically at odds but physically at odds. His art is a physical contradiction of the pseudo-things and advertisements about him, as his spirit is a psychic contradiction. The manifest ugliness of things made in the spirit of investment and profit is physically oppressive.