135.16 Attis-Adonis-Tammuz and his mother who was myrrh. In the Phrygian religion Attis was a vegetation god, and like Adonis he was worshiped as a vegetation god of resurrection, responsible for birth, death, and rebirth of plant life. By the time of his adoption by the Romans, he was celebrated as a powerful celestial god of spring resurrection. Adonis (meaning lord, like Hebrew Adonai) was the son of Myrrha. (See 10.18.) He was beautiful and also worshiped as a vegetation god. Aphrodite and Persephone were in love with him and struggled over him. After he was gored to death by a boar, Zeus solved the dispute by having him spend half the year (spring and summer months) above ground with Aphrodite and half the year underground with Persephone. Tammuz, a Babylonian god of agriculture and flocks, personified spring resurrection. The fertility goddess Ishtar loved him and when he died journeyed to the underworld to bring him back. In another legend, she killed him and restored him to life. His death and rebirth correspond to the festivals of Adonis and Attis.
139.7 a Chaldean Chaldea is in the southernmost valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The Chaldeans entered Babylonia in about 1000 B.C. Because astronomy and astrology were developed during their rule, “Chaldean” came to mean astrologer.
139.9 Balthasar, Melchior Two of the Wise Men, Magi, or Three Kings. Caspar (or Kaspar) is the third.
140.5 Abraham Abraham of Ur, descendent of Adam and Shem, was the father of the Jews. He made the earliest covenant with God, and brought his people into Canaan.
141.2 the house was filled with odour of the ointment In John’s version of the story of Mary washing Jesus’s feet: “Then took Mary a pound of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: the house was filled with the odour of the ointment” (John 12.3). See 159.10.
141.14–15 Judas whispered to his neighbour / and then they all began talking about the poor In John’s version Judas Iscariot criticizes Mary’s anointing of Jesus’s feet. “Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, which should betray him, Why was not this ointment given to the poor?” John 12.4–5.
142.1 Simon See 146.2–7.
142.10–13 Siren, Mermaid, Siren-song Emphasizing the erotic dangers of the anointment in the next lines, Simon connects Mary’s hair with a Siren and a fatal Siren-song. In The Odyssey, the Sirens with their seductive singing cause shipwrecks and drowning. Odysseus strapped himself to his mast so he could hear the beautiful allure of their song without being free to yield to temptation. A mermaid has the same characteristics as a siren.
143.13–14. this man if he were a prophet, would have known / who and what manner of woman this is. The story of a woman washing the feet of Jesus with her tears, drying them with her hair, kissing and anointing them with myrrh, appears in each of the gospels, with variations. “And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his face, and did wipe them, with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now when the Pharisee which had bidden saw it [the woman’s washing the feet of Jesus], he spake within himself, This man if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner” (Luk. 7.37–39). Christ says to Simon: “Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet; but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven the same loveth little. And he said unto her, thy sins are forgiven” (Luke. 7.44–48). See 135.9–10.
144.1–4 Balthasar … Melchior … Gaspar or Kaspar See 139.9.
145.15 Isis, Astarte, Cyprus Aphrodite was born in the sea off Paphos, Cyprus. See note 5.18.
145.18–20 Ge-meter, De-meter, earth-mother // or Venus / in a star In Greek Ge is earth; metron is measure, hence, measure of the earth, as in geometer. It is also a pun on De-meter, which is thought to mean earth-mother (De or da probably means earth; meter means mother). In this word, invented by H.D., is also Ge (Gaia) the earth goddess, born of Chaos and one of the first heavenly beings. Ge’s children were Uranus, the sky, and Pontus, the sea. As an earth goddess she was also an underworld deity, and ruled over an oracular center at Delphi (under which was the world’s navel, the pit) and another center in Olympia. In Rome she was Tellus or Terra. Demeter, in Greek religion, is the goddess of fertility and harvest. When her daughter Persephone was abducted she grieved so much the earth became barren. Searching for her daughter, she went to Eleusis, where the Eleusinian mysteries were initiated in her honor. The Thesmophoria, a fertility festival also in her honor, was attended only by women. The earth-mother was common to religions all over the earth. See Ge or Gaia above. Venus in a star. Although Venus is called the evening and morning star, it is a planet.
146.2–7 Simon Peter … Simon of Cyrene … Simon the sorcerer … the leper Simon Peter is the disciple and aposde of Jesus and brother of Andrew. Jesus gave him the name Peter (Gr., Petros, Heb./Aramaic, Kepha), meaning stone. Simon of Cyrene was a Jew probably from the Greek port city of Cyrene in present-day Libya. On the way to Golgotha where Jesus was crucified, the soldiers pressed Simon of Cyrene into carrying Jesus’s cross, according to Mt. 27.32 and Mk. 15.6. But John disagrees. In John 19.17, Jesus carries his own cross to Golgotha. Simon the sorcerer of Samaria is Simon Magus, a heretic of the second century, who attempts in Acts 8.9–25 to buy powers from the apostles with his silver, hence, the sin of simony. He is baptized and coverted by Peter. Simon of the Acts is most certainly confused with the more famous Simon the sorcerer, who is Simon Magus, the early heretic most hated by the church fathers, and who founded one of the first Gnostic sects. He held himself to be the savior, was a flamboyant magician, and in the extracanonical Acts of Peter has a daring contest with Peter in the Roman forum where he flies over Rome. In the house of Simon the leper, Jesus’s hair was anointed by Mary. Mt. 13.55. Mk. 6.3. See 143.13–14.
148.15 Jupiter Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. See 108.3–4.
149.3–5 in her were forgiven / the sins of the seven / daemons cast out of her “Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.” Mk. 16.9. See also Lk. 8.2.
153.13–16 islands of the Blest … Hesperides … Atlantis See 117.2 and 120.4–6.
157.1–2 Lilith born before Eve / and one born before Lilith Lilith was Adam’s first wife and a nocturnal demon lover of Jewish mythology. The word Lilith probably comes from the Assyrian storm demon Lilitu. She also seems to be the earlier “maid of desolation” (artdat lili) in the Sumerian Inanna’s garden, who was then expelled to become the “demon of waste places.” In her biblical incarnation, commentators have designated Lilith to be the “female” in the first creation story: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1.27). Here, in contrast to the second creation story (Gen. 2.4), where God in one day creates heaven and earth, Eden, and Adam alone in the garden, God creates both man and woman. Rabbinical Talmudic tradition used Gen. 1.27 (“male and female created he them”) to show that God created Adam and Lilith simultaneously from the dust. Since they were born equal, at the same time, Lilith will not recognize that Adam is her superior, nor will she be his servant, and she is turned out of Paradise. When she returns to Eden, she sleeps with Adam and has many children who are evil spirits. After another of her expulsions she refuses to return to Adam, and loses one hundred of her offspring each day. In the Muslim tradition, when Lilith returns to Eden, she cohabits with the Devil and gives birth to the jinn. After Lilith’s final expulsion
, God makes Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. In our day, Lilith has been seen as a symbol of woman’s unwillingness to assume an inferior station. one born before Lilith: It is uncertain who was born before Lilith, since according to legend she and Adam were born at the same time.
159.10 spikenard, very costly See 141.2.
160.1–2 Hermon, the place of the Transfiguation See 113.2 and 113.8.
160.7–8 even Solomon … was not arrayed like one of these After the Sermon on the Mount, and the Beatitudes, Jesus tells the multitudes not to worry about the earthly concerns of food, drink and clothing, but to have faith: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he, not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?” Mt. 6.28–30.
160.9 the almond-trees See note for title Flowering of the Rod, 111, also 70.9–10.
160.12 Lebanon Mentioned in the Song of Solomon for Hermon mountain and for its beauty.
161.1 Hebron The highest town in Palestine, 927 meters above sea level. Abraham lived there and bought the field of Machpelah and the cave there as a burial site. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, and Jacob were buried there. (Gen. 49.30–33.) In Hebron David was anointed King of Judah, and then King of Israel. (2 Samuel 2.4, 2 Samuel 5.1–3.) Later Absalom rebeled against David, also in Hebron. (2 Samuel 15.)
169.5–6 Bathasar … Melchior See 139.9.
Note on deleted sections of The Flowering of the Rod In the notes of H.D.: Collected Poems 1912–1944 (New Directions, 1983, pp. 622–624), editor Louis L. Martz includes four beautiful sections of The Rod which H.D. omitted from the book’s text. Martz notes: “Among the typescripts [of Trilogy] we find the following sections with the heading in H.D.’s hand: ‘Dec. 1944. / Deleted from: / The Rod.’”
A NOTE ON H.D.’S LIFE
Hilda Doolittle was born September 10, 1886, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where she spent her childhood in a Moravian community. Her father, Charles Doolittle, was a professor of astronomy at Lehigh University. Her mother, Helen Doolittle was deeply involved in the leadership of the semi-mystical Moravian church and came from a German-Polish family descended from the Unitas Fratrum, a Bohemian brotherhood that left Germany for America in the 1840s to found, among its first three cities, Bethlehem. The Doolittle family were early settlers from England. Uncomfortable with her “quaint” name Hilda Doolittle, she later took Ezra Pound’s suggestion to make it simply H.D., which remained her literary name for life. In 1896 when she was ten, the family moved to Philadelphia where her father had accepted a position at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, the Quaker meeting house replaced the Moravian church.
In 1901 while still at the Moravian Girls’ Seminary, she met Ezra Pound at a Halloween party. A few years later she was at Bryn Mawr College, and Pound, having returned from Hamilton College, was a graduate student at Penn. In 1905, H.D. and Pound were engaged, an incident thoroughly disapproved of by Hilda’s parents. H.D. withdrew from Bryn Mawr the next year and studied at home until 1910. By then Pound was off to Venice and London where he, F.S. Flint, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, and others became the literary group known as the Imagists. H.D. settled in London in 1911, studied with Aldington, and soon became central to the group. She published her first Imagist poems under the name “H.D. Imagiste” (the name and label were Pound’s). When Pound left her, she married Richard Aldington; the next year Pound married Dorothy Shakespear. Despite later claims by individual Imagists about how slight their involvement was in the movement (except Pound who took credit for inventing it), Imagism did launch a number of young outsider poets onto the London literary scene.
In 1914 H.D. met D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Her friendship with Lawrence was passionate and ended with disappointment and anger, yet both continued to esteem each other until Lawrence’s death in 1930. The next years saw H.D. diversely published in anthologies and literary reviews, and in 1916 she published her first book of poems, Sea Garden. It appeared in London with Constable & Co. and in Boston and New York with Houghton Mifflin. After Aldington enlisted in the army, H.D. took over for her husband as literary editor of the Egoist where she remained until 1917 when she was replaced by T.S. Eliot. The next year her brother Gilbert was killed in France during the Great War.
A major figure entered the poet’s life in 1918, Bryher Ellerman. Intelligent, domineering, admiring, and rich, Bryher was to accompany her on trips, eventually live with her for some years, and be a “guardian angel” until H.D.’s death. In 1919 H.D.’s daughter Perdita was born and the same year her husband left her. She sought help from Bryher. Meanwhile, she published her translation of Euripides and more poems. In 1920 she traveled with Bryher to Greece and America, where as author of three books she was warmly received by poets and editors, among them Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, and Louis Untermeyer. William Carlos Williams came to visit at her hotel, along with his younger friend Robert McAlmon, a novelist. McAlmon and Bryher married some months later in New York “in name” only, so that Bryher could be legally free of her father and McAlmon could receive financial freedom.
Back in London in 1921, H.D. wrote, had friends, and disappointments. She took up partial residence in Switzerland, but continued her extensive travels. In 1923 she went to Egypt with her mother, Bryher, and Perdita, which influenced her deeply, as can be seen in Trilogy. She also traveled to Paris, where she was in touch with the literati and many expatriates, but she had limited interest in the famous Paris café life. Always prolific, by 1925 she had published three new books, Hymen (Egoist/Holt, 1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (Jonathan Cape/Houghton Mifflin, 1924), and Collected Poems of H.D. (Boni & Liveright, 1925). In 1926 in Paris she published Palimpsest (a title true to her work) with Contact Editions, which was run by McAlmon, whom Bryher divorced the next year. Then, also in 1927, Bryher suddenly married Kenneth Macpherson, H.D.’s new lover, in order to provide financial backing to Kenneth so he could continue his alliance with H.D. Macpherson began to make films, and in Foothills, H.D. played the main role. Macpherson also started the first film magazine, Close-Up, and it was immediately successful. Soon H.D. was connected with the great German film directors G. W. Pabst and Fritz Lang. She wrote and then produced with Macpherson their most important film, Borderline, in which she acted opposite the American actor and singer Paul Robeson and momentarily fell in love with him. For H.D., her excursion into films, when the industry was young and experimental, was immensely stimulating. The book version of Borderline was published by the Mercury Press in London in 1930. By now she had also put out Hedylus (Houghton Mifflin, 1928) to be followed by Red Roses for Bronze (Chatto & Windus, London, 1931/Houghton Mifflin, 1931).
The culminating event occurred in 1933 when Sigmund Freud, then seventy-seven, agreed to welcome H.D., forty-seven, as his analysand for a period of one month, at his apartment at 19 Bergasse in Vienna. The following year, 1934, she returned to Vienna to complete her sessions with the master, whom she would celebrate and gently criticize in Tribute to Freud (Pantheon, 1956). In the late ’30s H.D. was increasingly disturbed by the impending war. She spent much time discussing with Freud what could be done and with Freud and Bryher worked to help rescue and finance Jewish emigration. When the situation deteriorated, Bryher used her financial resources to help Jews flee Germany into Switzerland, and following the Nazi invasion of Austria on March 11, 1938, through Marie Bonaparte, Ernest Jones, and the diplomatic intervention of the American ambassador to France, W. C. Bullit, among others, the members of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society were permitted to emigrate to London. In London, the doctor lived in a small apartment on Sloane Street where H.D. visited him. He died in 1939 in Hamstead.
When war broke out, H.D. stayed in London, and during the war period, she and Bryher lived together. Among her many wartime friends were t
he Sitwells and Norman Holmes Pearson, her admirer at Yale, who would eventually become her assiduous literary agent and executor. Shadowed by the war and England’s survival, she published her syncretistic poetic scripture, The Walls Do Not Fall in 1944, and in the same year wrote Tribute to the Angels and The Flowering of the Rod. In 1973, twelve years after her death, they appeared together for the first time in the New Directions book Trilogy. When Ezra Pound, her former fiancé and mentor, supported fascism and broadcasted for Mussolini over Rome Radio, H.D.’s relations with him ceased. During his years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane and after his return to Rapallo they corresponded. However, she declined his request to see her in Kusnacht in the last years of her life.
In 1946 H.D. decided to move alone to Lausanne, Switzerland, where she lived in the Hotel de la Paix. There she spent the next six years. She had recovered from depression and electric shock treatment and entered the most prolific years of an already productive life. She published By Avon River (Macmillan, 1949), gathered her Selected Poems, which Grove put out in 1957, and completed her epic book of “cantos,” Helen in Egypt. She also finished End to Torment: A Memoir of Pound (New Directions, 1973) and her novel based on Richard Aldington, Bid Me to Live (Grove Press, 1960).
Then at age sixty-seven, in 1953, H.D. suffered an abdominal occlusion and was operated on in Lausanne. After a second operation, with Bryher’s intervention, she moved to a medical residence in Kusnacht, some miles outside Zurich. She was happy in her sanitarium. In 1956 Norman Holmes Pearson managed to lure her back to America for a visit in which she was celebrated at Yale. In 1960 she returned again to America to receive the Gold Medal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the first award of its kind and their highest honor. When she returned, she completed Hermetic Definition, which contained the lines, “I did not know that I must keep faith / with something, I called it writing / write, write or die.” In July, 1961, she had a stroke and died on the 28th of September. The day before her death she received her copy of Helen in Egypt. She was buried on Nisky Hill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
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