the will to rest after long flight;
but who knows the desperate urge
of those others — actual or perhaps now
mythical birds—who seek but find no rest
till they drop from the highest point of the spiral
or fall from the innermost centre of the ever-narrowing
circle? for they remember, they remember, as they sway and hover,
what once was—they remember, they remember —
they will not swerve — they have known bliss,
the fruit that satisfies — they have come back —
what if the islands are lost? what if the waters
cover the Hesperides? they would rather remember —
remember the golden apple-trees;
O, do not pity them, as you watch them drop one by
one,
for they fall exhausted, numb, blind
but in certain ecstasy,
for theirs is the hunger
for Paradise.
[6]
So I would rather drown, remembering —
than bask on tropic atolls
in the coral-seas; I would rather drown,
remembering—than rest on pine or fir-branch
where great stars pour down
their generating strength, Arcturus
or the sapphires of the Northern Crown;
I would rather beat in the wind, crying to these others:
yours is the more foolish circling,
yours is the senseless wheeling
round and round — yours has no reason —
I am seeking heaven;
yours has no vision,
I see what is beneath me, what is above me,
what men say is—not—I remember,
I remember, I remember — you have forgot:
you think, even before it is half-over,
that your cycle is at an end,
but you repeat your foolish circling—again, again,
again;
again, the steel sharpened on the stone;
again, the pyramid of skulls;
I gave pity to the dead,
O blasphemy, pity is a stone for bread,
only love is holy and love’s ecstasy
that turns and turns and turns about one centre,
reckless, regardless, blind to reality,
that knows the Islands of the Blest are there,
for many waters can not quench love’s fire.
[7]
Yet resurrection is a sense of direction,
resurrection is a bee-line,
straight to the horde and plunder,
the treasure, the store-room,
the honeycomb;
resurrection is remuneration,
food, shelter, fragrance
of myrrh and balm.
[8]
I am so happy,
I am the first or the last
of a flock or a swarm;
I am full of new wine;
I am branded with a word,
I am burnt with wood,
drawn from glowing ember,
not cut, nor marked with steel;
I am the first or the last to renounce
iron, steel, metal;
I have gone forward,
I have gone backward,
I have gone onward from bronze and iron,
into the Golden Age.
[9]
No poetic phantasy
but a biological reality,
a fact: I am an entity
like bird, insect, plant
or sea-plant cell;
I live; I am alive;
take care, do not know me,
deny me, do not recognise me,
shun me; for this reality
is infectious-ecstasy.
[10]
It is no madness to say
you will fall, you great cities,
(now the cities lie broken);
it is not tragedy, prophecy
from a frozen Priestess,
a lonely Pythoness
who chants, who sings
in broken hexameters,
doom, doom to city-gates,
to rulers, to kingdoms;
it is simple reckoning, algebraic,
it is geometry on the wing,
not patterned, a gentian
in an ice-mirror,
yet it is, if you like, a lily
folded like a pyramid,
a flower-cone,
not a heap of skulls;
it is a lily, if you will,
each petal, a kingdom, an aeon,
and it is the seed of a lily
that having flowered,
will flower again;
it is that smallest grain,
the least of all seeds
that grows branches
where the birds rest;
it is that flowering balm,
it is heal-all,
everlasting;
it is the greatest among herbs
and becometh a tree.
Palinode
Book One
[1]
We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt. How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Palinode, was the first to tell us. Some centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he reinstated her in his Palinode. Euripides, notably in The Trojan Women, reviles her, but he also is “restored to sight.” The later, little understood Helen in Egypt, is again a Palinode, a defence, explanation or apology.
According to the Palinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.
Do not despair, the hosts
surging beneath the Walls,
(no more than I) are ghosts;
do not bewail the Fall,
the scene is empty and I am alone,
yet in this Amen-temple,
I hear their voices,
there is no veil between us,
only space and leisure
and long corridors of lotus-bud
furled on the pillars,
and the lotus-flower unfurled,
with reed of the papyrus
Amen (or Zeus we call him)
brought me here;
fear nothing of the future or the past,
He, God, will guide you,
bring you to this place,
as he brought me, his daughter,
twin-sister of twin-brothers and
Clytaemnestra, shadow of us all;
the old enchantment holds,
here there is peace
for Helena, Helen hated of all Greece.
[2]
Lethe, as we all know, is the river of forgetfulness for the shadows, passing from life to death. But Helen, mysteriously transposed to Egypt, does not want to forget. She is both phantom and reality.
The potion is not poison,
it is not Lethe and forgetfulness
but everlasting memory,
the glory and the beauty of the ships,
the wave that bore them onward
and the shock of hidden shoal,
the peril of the rocks,
the weary fall of sail,
the rope drawn taut,
the breathing and breath-taking
climb and fall, mountain and valley
challenging, the coast
drawn near, drawn far,
the helmsman’s bitter oath
to see the goal receding
in the night; everlasting, everlasting
nothingness and lethargy of waiting;
O Helen, Helen, Daemon that thou art,
we will be done forever
with this charm, this evil philtre,
th
is curse of Aphrodite;
so they fought, forgetting women,
hero to hero, sworn brother and lover,
and cursing Helen through eternity.
[3]
Her concern is with the past, with the anathema or curse. But to the Greeks who perished on the long voyage out, or who died imprecating her, beneath the Walls, she says, “you are forgiven.” They did not understand what she herself can only dimly apprehend. She may perceive the truth, but how explain it? Is it possible that it all happened, the ruin- it would seem not only of Troy, but the “holocaust of the Greeks,” of which she speaks later—in order that two souls or two soul-mates should meet? It almost seems so.
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,
Lord of your legions, King of Myrmidons,
unconquerable, a mountain and a grave,
Achilles;
few were the words we said,
nor knew each other,
nor asked, are you Spirit?
are you sister? are you brother?
are you alive?
are you dead?
the harpers will sing forever
of how Achilles met Helen
among the shades,
but we were not, we are not shadows;
as we walk, heel and sole
leave our sandal-prints in the sand,
though the wounded heel treads lightly
and more lightly follow,
the purple sandals.
[4]
Had they met before? Perhaps. Achilles was one of the princely suitors for her hand, at the court of her earthly father, Tyndareus of Sparta. But this Helen is not to be recognized by earthly splendour nor this Achilles by accountrements 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?
what was the token given?
I was alone, bereft,
and wore no zone, no crown,
and he was shipwrecked,
drifting without chart,
famished and tempest-driven
the fury of the tempest in his eyes,
the bane of battle
and the legions lost;
for that was victory
and Troy-gates broken
in memory of the Body,
wounded, stricken,
the insult of the charioteer,
the chariot furiously driven,
the Furies’ taunt?
take heart Achilles, for you may not die,
immortal and invincible;
though the Achilles-heel treads lightly,
still I feel the tightening muscles,
the taut sinews quiver,
as if I, Helen, had withdrawn
from the bruised and swollen flesh,
the arrow from its wound.
[5]
This was the token, his mortality;
immortality and victory
were dissolved;
I am no more immortal,
I am man among the millions,
no hero-god among the Myrmidons;
some said a bowman from the Walls
let fly the dart, some said it was Apollo,
but I, Helena, know it was Love’s arrow;
the body honoured
by the Grecian host
was but an iron casement,
it was God’s plan
to melt the icy fortress of the soul,
and free the man;
God’s plan is other than the priests disclose;
I did not know why
(in dream or in trance)
God had summoned me hither,
until I saw the dim outline
grown clearer,
as the new Mortal,
shedding his glory,
limped slowly across the sand.
[6]
How did we greet each other?
here in this Amen-temple,
I have all-time to remember;
he comes, he goes;
I do not know what memory calls him,
or what Spirit-master
summons him to release
(as God released him)
the imprisoned, the lost;
few were the words we said,
but the words are graven on stone,
minted on gold, stamped upon lead;
they are coins of a treasure
or the graded weights
of barter and measure;
“I am a woman of pleasure,”
I spoke ironically into the night,
for he had built me a fire,
he, Achilles, piling brushwood,
finding an old flint in his pouch,
“I thought I had lost that”;
few were the words we said,
“I am shipwrecked, I am lost,”
turning to view the stars,
swaying as before the mast,
“the season is different,
we are far from — from —”
let him forget,
Amen, All-father,
let him forget.
[7]
Helen achieves the difficult task of translating a symbol in time, into timeless-time or hieroglyph or ancient Egyptian time. She knows the script, she says, but we judge that this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual. In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach. To Achilles, lately arrived from Troy and the carnage of battle, this is a “carrion creature,” but Helen would banish these memories. She says she is “instructed,” she is enchanted, rather. For from the depth of her racial inheritance, she invokes (as the perceptive visitor to Egypt must always do) the symbol or the “letter” that represents or recalls the protective mother-goddess. This is no death-symbol but a life-symbol, it is Isis or her Greek counterpart, Thetis, the mother of Achilles.
We huddled over the fire,
was there ever such a brazier?
a night-bird hooted past,
he started, “a curious flight,
a carrion creature — what —”
(dear God, let him forget);
I said, “there is mystery in this place,
I am instructed, I know the script,
the shape of this bird is a letter,
they call it the hieroglyph;
strive not, it is dedicate
to the goddess here, she is Isis”;
“Isis,” he said, “or Thetis,” I said,
recalling, remembering, invoking
his sea-mother;
flame, I prayed, flame forget,
forgive and forget the other,
let my heart be filled with peace,
let me love him, as Thetis, his mother,
for I knew him, I saw in his eyes
the sea-enchantment, but he
knew not yet, Helen of Sparta,
knew not Helen of Troy,
knew not Helena, hated of Greece.
[8]
How could I hide my eyes?
how could I veil my face?
with ash or charcoal from the embers?
I drew out a blackened stick,
but he snatched it,
he flung it back,
“what sort of enchantment is this?
what art will you wield with a fagot?
are you Hecate? are you a witch?
a vulture, a hieroglyph,
the
sign or the name of a goddess?
what sort of goddess is this?
where are we? who are you?
where is this desolate coast?
who am I? am I a ghost?”
“you are living, O child of Thetis,
as you never lived before,”
then he caught at my wrist,
“Helena, cursed of Greece,
I have seen you upon the ramparts,
no art is beneath your power,
you stole the chosen, the flower
of all-time, of all-history,
my children, my legions;
for you were the ships burnt,
O cursèd, O envious Isis,
you — you — a vulture, a hieroglyph”;
“Zeus be my witness,” I said,
“it was he, Amen dreamed of all this
phantasmagoria of Troy,
it was dream and a phantasy”;
O Thetis, O sea-mother,
I prayed, as he clutched my throat
with his fingers’ remorseless steel,
let me go out, let me forget,
let me be lost……..
O Thetis, O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak,
let me remember, let me remember,
forever, this Star in the night.
Book Two
[1]
But Helen seems concerned not only with the mystery of their reconciliation but with the problem of why he had, in the first instance, attacked her. There seems this latent hostility; with her love, there is fear, yet there is strength, too, and defiance not only of Achilles, but of the whole powerful war-faction.
Perhaps he was right
to call me Hecate and a witch;
I do not care for separate
might and grandeur,
I do not want to hear of Agamemnon
and the Trojan Walls,
I do not want to recall
shield, helmet, greaves,
though he wore them,
for that, I might recall them,
being part of his first
unforgettable anger;
Selected Poems of Hilda Doolittle Page 13
