The H.D. Book (32 page)

There is a passion of mind that moves toward abstract beauty, the Ionian style, “the valiant yet totally unselfconscious withdrawal of the personality of the artist.” That is part of it. “Let not our hearts break before the beauty of Pallas Athene,” H.D. continues: “No”:

she makes all things possible for us. The human mind today pleads for all; nothing is misplaced that in the end may be illuminated by the inner fire of abstract understanding; hate, love, degradation, humiliation, all, all may be examined, given due proportion and dismissed finally, in the light of the mind’s vision. Today, again at a turning-point in the history of the world, the mind stands, to plead, to condone, to explain, to clarify, to illuminate.

then:
“each one of us is responsible.”
then:
“What now will we make of it?”

In 1932, she had begun sequences of an Electra-Orestes play; in 1937 another section “Orestes Theme” appeared in
Life and Letters Today.
In 1935 two long sequences “The Dancer” and “The Poet”; in 1937 “In Our Town,” “Star by Day
,
” and “Wooden Animal”; in 1938 “Apollo at Delphi” in
Poetry;
in 1939 two fragments, “Saturn” and “Zeus-Provider” from a proposed “Temple of the Sun.” From 1932 to 1942 only scattered essays in poetry appear.

There was the great work to undertake, but it was only in the experience of war-time London of the Second World War, where in the actual bombings life and death were so mixed, hope and despair, that the time ripened, the things of the poet’s own inner life came due. The days of bombardment, the trials and crucible of the war, furnish a crucible of the poem where the long prepared art, the accumulated craft and knowledge fit or work. But it is the time too that fits, that works. In prophecy, this is the proof. It is the fulfilling of the word.

As at Pisa, uprooted from his study and his
idées fixes,
“a lone ant from a broken ant-hill,” Ezra Pound was to come, in another part of
the war, in the Summer and Fall of 1945, to a turning point, exposed, at the heart of the matter. Mussolini had been torn to pieces, like Cola di Rienzi his Renaissance counterpart. “Manes was tanned and stuffed,” Pound remembers in the first Pisan canto. The poet had hitchhiked to Pisa and surrendered, given himself up to the army. Had he expected death? His fellow prisoners are led off to the firing squad each day. And, for the first time in
The Cantos,
in these Pisan Cantos, some attitude of authority, some self is surrendered, so that a pose seems to have fallen apart, exposing the genuine, confused, passionate mind. “A lizard upheld me,” he testifies. He is in the condition of first things.

Not since the Imagist years, between 1912 and 1915, had Pound’s and H.D.’s poetry belonged to a common movement. He had gone on from the Vorticism of Gaudier-Brzeska with its spirit of forms to the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis with its blast at culture. The Pound of the thirties with his treatises on economics and his historical comparisons of Jefferson and Mussolini seems far indeed from the world of H.D. But when
The Pisan Cantos
appeared in 1949 how closely Pound’s lines:

If the hoar frost grip thy tent
Thou wilt give thanks when night is spent.

recalled H.D.’s lines from
Tribute to the Angels
that had been published in 1945:

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

In December of 1944, H.D. had finished her War Trilogy; she was 58. At Pisa, Pound was 60 when he finished
The Pisan Cantos.
William Carlos Williams at 62 in 1944 was working on
Paterson
I. For each there was to be ahead, in the last years of their lives, a major creative phase.

And “to reveal that secret and sacred presence”—there was to be
Paterson.
“It called for a poetry such as I did not know,” Williams writes in his
Autobiography,
“it was my duty to discover or make such a context. . . . ”

“ ‘How deep is the water?’ asked Paul. ‘I mean at the deepest place?’ ”
Paterson
I (1946):

So you think because the rose
is red that you shall have the mastery?
The rose is green and will bloom,
overtopping you . . .

Paterson
II (1948) “Sunday in the Park”:

His anger mounts. He is chilled to the bone.
As there appears a dwarf, hideously deformed—

It is the genius of the place, of the falls—but the falls are the locus of the poem in the language; the river, the rhetoric. The dwarf then is the poet’s own familiar:

The dwarf lived there, close to the waterfall—
saved by his protective coloring.

And in
Paterson
III (1949), “The Library,” another image of the language but the poem itself also, and then of the poet, occurs:

An old bottle, mauled by the fire
gets a new glaze, the glass warped
to a new distinction, reclaiming the
undefined.

It seemed to me then that Williams, in the imagination, had come to the same place, under fire, that appears in
Tribute to the Angels
where:

then she set a charred tree before us,
burnt and stricken to the heart;

as if in London, in Pisa, in Paterson, there had been phases of a single revelation. Indeed, Williams saw that if his Paterson “rose to flutter into life awhile—it would be as itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world.” Was it that the war—the bombardment for H.D., the imprisonment and exposure to the elements for Ezra Pound, the divorce in the speech for Williams—touched a spring of passionate feeling in the poet that was not the war but was his age, his ripeness in life. They were almost “old”; under fire to come “to a new distinction.”

Where the fullness of their age was also the fullness of an historical age, as if the Second World War were a trouble of the times, unprepared or prepared for its old age?

They give, these three works out of the war, a text for the historian of our contemporary spirit; as Shakespeare gives text for the Tudor Renaissance; as Dante gives text for the thirteenth century catholic world.

In the light of these works I write today. Taking them as my immediate ancestors, as they in turn took Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti and William Morris, and Robert Browning, as theirs. As Pound has his direct heritage from Yeats, carrying over the neo-Platonism, the Greek and Renaissance mystery cults, Plotinus and Gemistos Plethon—and even (
Section: Rock-Drill,
Canto XCI) the Rosicrucian John Heydon. Heydon had appeared first in the early drafts of Canto III:

Another one, half-cracked: John Heydon,
Worker of miracles, dealer in levitation,
“Servant of God and secretary of nature,”
The half transparent forms, in trance at Bulverton:

Pound owing as much of his medium to Yeats—how Pound becomes a medium himself—as Yeats owed modern measure to Pound.

In “Sagesse,” the first ten poems of which were published in
Evergreen Review
5, Summer 1958, H.D. comes round close to Yeats, for she takes the Kabbalist theurgy directly over from
La Kabbale Pratique
of Robert Ambelain as a poetic practice:

An owl hooted out in the darkness,
so the angel came—what angel and what name?

is it Tara,
Dieu fontaine de sagesse
and the angel Ptébiou? it was his hour

or near his hour, what did he say?

seeking to follow along the line of associations:

into a mystery, the haunted mere of Märchen
and old legends, or even Lethe or Eunoë, now and here.

She had never been, actually, close to Yeats, nor had she read his works. “Of course—what a tour de force,” she writes in a letter in 1960
of Virginia Moore’s study of Yeats: “that digging out the very ‘secret’ R. C. ceremonial! Odd, I met Yeats and ‘Georgie,’ as they first called her, & they invited me to Oxford—but something held me back. I did not know that ‘Georgie’ was a medium or he, what he was.”

She did not know then that there had been a poet before her who tried to draw images from Hermetic cult and rite. Nor how close to the “Yeatsian” tradition she was in her own way in “Sagesse” as she asks,

what am I doing? am I swept into a cycle
of majestic Spirits, myself aspiring yet questioning

my right to mention even one of the seventy-two regents
of the right Temple of the
Œdipus
gyptiacus

And Pound in Canto XCI:

that the body of light come forth

                      from the body of fire

And that your eyes come to the surface

from the deep wherein they were sunken,

Reina—for 300 years,

         and now sunken

That your eyes come forth from their caves

   & light then

            as the holly-leaf

     qui laborat, orat

Thus Undine came to the rock,

                           by Circeo

and the stone eyes again looking seaward

   Thus Apollonius

                                    (if it was Apollonius)

& Helen of Tyre

This nearness to Lethe or Eunoë, to shadow or light, to the astral or phantasmal world in which Simon Magus and his Helen still have their powers, is the daydream of old age. Which has no reality except in the imagination. As, too, in the “Coda” to “Asphodel,” William Carlos Williams comes close to the myrrh and light of H.D.’s
Flowering of the Rod
when he writes of what it is like “after a lifetime”:

Asphodel

has no odor

               save to the imagination

but it too

celebrates the light.

               It is late

but an odor

as from our wedding

               has revived for me

These three—Pound, Williams, and H.D.—belonged in their youth to a brilliant, still brilliant generation that began writing just before the First World War and publishing in
The Egoist
in London, in
Poetry
and
Others
in America. They alone of their generation—and we must add D. H. Lawrence to their company—saw literature as a text of the soul in its search for fulfillment in life and took the imagination as a primary instinctual authority. The generative imagination Pound called it. They took the full risk of seeking to fulfill their vision of the poet as seer and creator. It is the heroic concept of the poet that the Romantics had had, Carlyle’s Hero as Poet, whose “
musical
thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost harmony of it, namely the melody that lies hidden in it; the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War Edith Sitwell was inspired to write in the prophetic mode of high poetry. But the rest of that company—Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot—remain within the rational imagination and do not suffer from the creative disorders of primitive mind, the shamanistic ecstasies and the going “after strange gods.” Following this generation that had made the breakthru came not a creative but a reactionary period. There is one lonely ghost light of poetry where Hart Crane is seized by his vision of the Bridge. There is one lonely acolyte of poetry where Louis Zukofsky perfects his art, wrapped in the cocoon of an “objectivism” derived from Pound and Williams, a hidden
zaddik
in a thicket of theory, to emerge in the
myrrh and light of
“A”,
to keep the music, and in the working hive of his thought in
Bottom: On Shakespeare.

For a new generation of young writers in the early fifties,
The Pisan Cantos
and then
Paterson
had been the challenge. But for me, The War Trilogy of H.D. came earlier, for searching out those first vatic poems of Edith Sitwell that Kenneth Rexroth had shown me in
Life and Letters Today
I had come across H.D.’s passages from
The Walls Do Not Fall.
Then came “Writing on the Wall” and “Good Frend.” When the third volume of the Trilogy,
The Flowering of the Rod,
was published in 1946 I had found my book. From the beginning then, certainly from 1947 or 1948 when I was working on
Medieval Scenes
and taking H.D. as my master there among the other masters, there was The War Trilogy. In smoky rooms in Berkeley, in painters’ studios in San Francisco, I read these works aloud; dreamed about them; took my life in them; studied them as my anatomy of what Poetry must be.

A new constellation was appearing in those days in the magazine
Origin.
It had started with a manifesto by a man called Charles Olson—he had come to see me once in Berkeley, but I did not know then that he was a poet—that was just after
Medieval Scenes
in 1947—it had started with Olson’s “Projective Verse” essay of 1950, or it had started with a correspondence between this Olson and a Robert Creeley, a poet younger than myself. In Spring 1951 another poet Cid Corman published the first issue of
Origin.
There, for the first time in the work of any contemporary, I began to find a Call to Order. “I, Maximus, of Gloucester, To You” the first poem began: