Selected Poems of Hilda Doolittle

by Hilda Doolittle

  H.D. had more to prophesy than female equality: she felt in the thirties what she had felt during World War I, the need of redemption for a whole society, as expressed in her long sequence of 1916, “The Tribute,” a poem that shows H.D.’s acute sensitivity to contemporary events. So too now in the middle thirties, her version of the Ion, with its interspersed prose commentary, urges the distressed world not to despair: as the Ion represents the birth of Greek (lonian) culture, so now, a new era may yet be born for Europe. Thus H.D. carries on the dual message of all prophets: her eye is on the problems of the present, whose evils she can firmly denounce, yet her prophecies offer hope and consolation, after the manner of the Hebrew prophets, who mingled denunciations of doom with promises of salvation. In this redemption the liberated role of woman was to play an indispensable part.

  So now the way is ready for H.D. to write her wartime Trilogy, completed in December of 1944, poems inspired by her living in London throughout the worst years of the bombing. The work is sometimes called epic, but, like the later Helen in Egypt, it seems rather to belong to the genre of prophecy, because it consists of a sequence of short lyric or meditative utterances, presenting a series of inner voices and visions amid the ruins of London:

  ruin everywhere, yet as the fallen roof

  leaves the sealed room

  open to the air,

  so, through our desolation,

  thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us

  through gloom:

  unaware, Spirit announces the Presence…

  And soon she hears a Voice speaking above the “whirr and roar in the high air,” and she has her strange vision of the Egyptian gods, Ra, Osiris, Amen-Ra, appearing “in a spacious, bare meeting-house” such as she knew in Philadelphia or in her Moravian childhood, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. All religions for her, as for Lawrence in his later writings, are blending into one; the goal is to:

  recover the secret of Isis,

  which is: there was One

  in the beginning, Creator,

  Fosterer, Begetter, the Same-forever

  in the papyrus-swamp

  in the Judean meadow.

  Here the technique of parallelism and repetition, in the distich form, is reminiscent of biblical poetry: it is a technique followed throughout Trilogy, except for the prologue in tercets.

  The first part of the trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall, is preparatory, exploratory, an assertion of belief. The finding of the secret of Isis comes in the second part, Tribute to the Angels, which begins under the guidance of the mythical Hermes Trismegistus, father of language and founder of ancient Egyptian culture: but his influence merges with the book of Revelation and the Gospels as H.D. recalls how the author of the book of Revelation had tried to warn off future prophets by saying at the end, “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” H.D. remembers this, but she also remembers that the figure of Christ in the prophecy itself had said something quite different:

  I John saw. I testify;

  if any man shall add

  God shall add unto him the plagues,

  but he that sat upon the throne said,

  I make all things new.

  I John saw. I testify,

  but I make all things new,

  said He of the seven stars …

  Here she recalls what Christ said from the throne in Chapter 21 of the book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.” And so, with this word, she writes and discovers soon the very sign of renewal as springtime in London brings forth flowers and new shoots of trees among the ruins (like the charred olive-tree of Athene that her devotee finds on the ruined Acropolis):7

  the lane is empty but the levelled wall

  is purple as with purple spread

  upon an altar,

  this is the flowering of the rood,

  this is the flowering of the reed.

  Then she walks through a ruined wall and sees:

  a half-burnt-out apple-tree

  blossoming;

  this is the flowering of the rood,

  this is the flowering of the wood,

  where Annael, we pause to give

  thanks that we rise again from death and live.

  From here she moves on to a dream-vision such as Freud had taught her to trust, the dream of a Lady in White. Was it the Virgin Mary? She teases us with this idea for a while, recalling the Madonnas of the painters, but no, the Lady could not be this, because “she bore / none of her usual attributes; I the Child was not with her.” Who then was she?

  Ah (you say), this is Holy Wisdom, Santa Sophia, the SS of the Sanctus Spiritus,

  so by facile reasoning, logically

  the incarnate symbol of the Holy Ghost…

  H.D. is teasing here the academic reader given to such learned interpretations:

  O yes you understand, I say,

  this is all most satisfactory,

  but she wasn’t hieratic, she wasn’t frozen, she wasn’t very tall…

  she carries a book but it is not

  the tome of the ancient wisdom,

  the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages

  of the unwritten volume of the new;

  all you say, is implicit, all that and much more…

  she is Psyche, the butterfly,

  out of the cocoon.

  She is the prophetic spirit of the poet, released now to relate in the third part of her trilogy, The Flowering of the Rod, a relaxed and happy fable of redemption that tells how Mary Magdalen obtained from Kaspar, one of the Magi, the jar from which she anointed the feet of Christ. It is a tale of healing addressed not only to London but to all the “smouldering cities” of Europe, as the opening sections here included make clear.

  Her use of the myth of Isis in the Trilogy leads on to the central image of her longest and most difficult poem, Helen in Egypt, published in the year of her death, 1961, but completed in 1952-55. It is a work of intermingled prose and poetry, like the Ion. After the poetical sequence was completed in 1954, H.D. composed what she called “captions” to go with each poem, and she directed their placement. So there the captions are, and their presence creates a different work from the purely poetical sequence that she originally composed. (In this selection some of the longer captions have been omitted.) We may prefer to read the poems by themselves, but we can hardly ignore the captions entirely. The question is: How do they function?

  We may find an answer by remembering how often the prophetic writings of the Bible, as in the books of Isaiah or Jeremiah, intermingle poetry and prose, with the effect that the prose creates a setting, or an explanation, for the poem that follows. In this analogy lies perhaps a key to the kind of work she is writing, and thus a key to the way in which we might deal with her intermingling of poetry and prose, here as well as in the Ion. If we regard Helen in Egypt as belonging to the genre of prophecy, we can perhaps see more clearly how the various voices in the poem work — including the prose voices. As the example of the Hebrew prophets will indicate, it is the role of the prophet to hear voices and to speak forth the words of those voices. The very word prophet, in Greek, means “one who speaks for another” — for God, for the gods, or for other human beings.

  From the opening poems in Helen in Egypt, H.D.’s Helen speaks with the voice of a prophet, saying “in this Amen-temple” (the temple of Amen-Ra, or Zeus-Ammon, in Egypt) she hears the “voices” of “the hosts / surging beneath the Walls” of Troy, voices that cry

  O Helen, Helen, Daemon that thou art,

  we will be done forever

  with this charm, this evil philtre,

  this curse of Aphrodite….

  But the third poem presents a voice of redemption as Helen says

  Alas, my brothers,

  Helen did not walk

  upon the ramparts,

  she whom you cursed

  was but the phantom and
the shadow thrown

  of a reflection;

  you are forgiven for I know my own,

  and God for his own purpose

  wills it so, that I

  stricken, forsaken draw to me,

  through magic greater than the trial of arms,

  your own invincible, unchallenged Sire…

  The poem is based on the alternate myth of Helen which Euripides used in his play on that subject and which Richard Strauss used for his opera The Egyptian Helen. Here the story says that Helen never was in Troy, but that the gods sent there a phantom of Helen, while the true Helen was transported by Zeus to Egypt where, after the war, she was reunited with Menelaus, or in H.D.’s version, with Achilles:

  But this Helen is not to be recognized by earthly

  splendour nor this Achilles by accoutrements of valour. It is the lost legions that have conditioned their encounter, and “the sea-enchantment in his eyes.”

  How did we know each other?

  was it the sea-enchantment in his eyes

  of Thetis, his sea-mother?

  In that phrase “the sea-enchantment in his eyes” we meet in both the prose and the poetry the leading phrase and symbol of the work, for Thetis will, as the sequence proceeds, be merged with Aphrodite, also born of the sea, and with Isis, called in the prose “the Egyptian Aphrodite.” Helen herself is in the latter part of the work transformed into a living symbol of all these goddesses: the love of Achilles for Helen, then, suggests a way of redeeming the war-torn world, as the voice of Helen has said very early in the poem:

  it was God’s plan

  to melt the icy fortress of the soul,

  and free the man …

  All this is quite in accord with the dual meaning of the work that H.D. has suggested in a letter to Norman Pearson, where she says that her poem has both “exoteric” meaning related to “all war problems.., as well as being strictly INNER and esoteric and personal.” 8 That is to say, the imagery of war suggests the problems raised by war for all mankind down through the ages, along with the personal problems that such wars cause for individual lives, and caused, as we know, for H.D. herself, witness of two wars. Helen has taken within herself the sufferings of the whole war-stricken world:

  mine, the great spread of wings,

  the thousand sails,

  the thousand feathered darts

  that sped them home,

  mine, the one dart in the Achilles-heel,

  the thousand-and-one, mine.

  To say that Helen speaks throughout as the prophet or priestess of Isis would be to sum up the meaning of the work, for Isis is the benevolent, creative goddess of love, known throughout the Mediterranean world as the “Goddess of many names.”

  The reconciliation that love creates between Helen and Achilles (a figure based upon H.D.’s wartime acquaintance with Sir Hugh Dowding, head of the British Fighter Command) is part of a long process of personal reconciliations. Though her poems absorb, re-create, and transcend the biographical element, the personal dimension is always there. Her reconciliations include, first, Lawrence, as she makes clear in Advent, the diary of her consultations with Freud, in “The Poet” (as it seems), and perhaps also in the latter part of the enigmatic sequence “Sigil,” from which poem XI was published in 1931, the year after Lawrence’s death.9 Reconciliation with Aldington was much more difficult, as one may see from her treatment of the wholly destructive figure of Paris in Helen in Egypt. Yet acceptance, at least, came at the end, as some lines from “Winter Love” indicate:

  Paris-Oenone?

  Helen, commend their happiness

  and so invoke the greater bliss

  of Helios-Helen-Eros.

  Reconciliation with Pound is the chief impetus within “Winter Love,” and here the reconciliation was easier, since Pound had made amends in the “Dryad” passage of his Pisan Canto 83:

  , your eyes are like clouds

  Nor can who has passed a month in the death cells believe in capital punishment

  No man who has passed a month in the death cells believes in cages for beasts

  , your eyes are like the clouds over Taishan When some of the rain has fallen and half remains yet to fall…

  Dryad, thy peace is like water

  There is September sun on the pools

  The passage seems to evoke the memory of the early sonnet to Hilda entitled “PAX” (a word twice used thematically in the earlier part of Canto 83):

  Meseemeth that ’tis sweet this wise to lie

  Somewhile quite parted from the stream of things

  Watching alone the clouds’ high wanderings

  As free as they are in some wind-free sky

  While naught but thoughts of thee as clouds glide by…

  “Winter Love” returns the memory, recalling in section 5 the parental interdiction of their embraces:

  the rough stones of a wall,

  the fragrance of honey-flowers, the bees,

  and how I would have fallen but for a voice,

  calling through the brambles

  and tangle of bay-berry

  and rough broom,

  Helen, Helen, come home;

  there was a Helen before there was a War,

  but who remembers her?

  Then section 6 recalls the shock of the lover’s departure on his ship.

  “Euphorion,” the mythic child of Helen and Achilles in Helen in Egypt, here becomes, in accord with the Greek root of the word, an allegorical figure of “well-being,” a state of health, a state of hope, a symbol of poetry. But the hope (“Espérance”) is hard to hold: as death threatens the poet, the “Child” of Helios-Helen-Eros is almost more than the writer can bear. For a time (like Cassandra in her poem) H.D. begs the presiding mother-goddess to relieve her of this prophetic burden, but in the end her strength survives:

  I die in agony whether I give or do not

  give; cruel, cruel Sage-Femme,

  wiser than all the regents of God’s throne,

  why do you torture me?

  come, come, O Espérance,

  Espérance, O golden bee,

  take life afresh and if you must,

  so slay me.

  LOUIS L. MARTZ

  NOTES

  1. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1960), pp. 21, 92.

  2. Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 94.

  3. For detailed discussion of these revisions see H.D.: Collected Poems, 1912-1944 (New York: New Directions, 1983), pp. xiv-xviii, 617-18.

  4. See H.D.: Collected Poems, 1912-1944, p. xx.

  5. HERmione (New York: New Directions, 1984), pp. 73, 84.

  6. “Hilda’s Book” is published as an appendix to H.D.’s memoir of Pound, End to Torment, ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King (New York: New Directions, 1979). For the close relation between the novel HER and “Hilda’s Book” see the essay by Susan Friedman in Poesis 6 (1985), 56-73.

  7. See the passage from H.D.’s Ion in this selection, p. 125.

  8. See her unpublished letter to Norman Pearson, November 26, 1955, which also contains her directions concerning the “captions.” (H.D. Archive, Beinecke Library, Yale University)

  9. For the relation of this sequence to Women in Love see the essay by Gary Burnett in H.D. Newsletter 1 (1987), 32-35.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  We wish to express our gratitude to Perdita Schaffner for permission to publish her mother’s writings, and to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University for permission to study and publish materials from the H.D. Archive in that library. The editor wishes to thank Carolyn Grassi for valuable advice and assistance in the preparation of this selection.

  Sea Rose

  Rose, harsh rose,

  marred and with stint of petals,

  meagre flower, thin,

  sparse of leaf,

  more precious

  than a wet rose

  single on a stem —

  you are caught in the drift.

/>   Stunted, with small leaf,

  you are flung on the sand,

  you are lifted

  in the crisp sand

  that drives in the wind.

  Can the spice-rose

  drip such acrid fragrance

  hardened in a leaf?

  Sea Lily

  Reed,

  slashed and torn

  but doubly rich —

  such great heads as yours

  drift upon temple-steps,

  but you are shattered

  in the wind.

  Myrtle-bark

  is flecked from you,

  scales are dashed

  from your stem,

  sand cuts your petal,

  furrows it with hard edge,

  like flint

  on a bright stone.

  Yet though the whole wind

  slash at your bark,

  you are lifted up,

  aye — though it hiss

  to cover you with froth.

  Evening

  The light passes

  from ridge to ridge,