Selected Poems of Hilda Doolittle Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FROM Sea Garden 1916

  Sea Rose

  Sea Lily

  Evening

  Sheltered Garden

  Sea Poppies

  Garden

  Sea Violet

  Orchard

  Sea Gods

  Storm

  Sea Iris

  Hermes of the Ways

  Pear Tree

  Miscellaneous Poems 1914-1917

  Oread

  The Pool

  Moonrise

  The Tribute (1-6)

  Amaranth

  Eros

  Envy

  Eurydice

  FROM Hymen 1921

  Hippolytus Temporizes

  The Islands

  Fragment 113

  FROM Heliodora 1924

  Helen

  Fragment Thirty-Six

  Cassandra

  Toward the Piraeus

  FROM Red Roses for Bronze 1931

  Let Zeus Record

  Epitaph

  The Mysteries

  Miscellaneous Poems 1931-1938 (?)

  Magician

  Sigil (XI, XII, XIV-XIX)

  Calypso

  The Dancer

  The Master

  The Poet

  A Dead Priestess Speaks

  FROM Euripides: Ion

  TRANSLATED WITH NOTES BY H.D. 1937

  (Concluding Episode)

  FROM Trilogy 1944-1946

  (Composed 1942-1944)

  The Walls Do Not Fall (1-4, 6-10, 16, 21-23, 39, 40, 43)

  Tribute to the Angels (1-4, 6-8, 16-20, 23-25, 29-32, 35-38, 41, 43)

  The Flowering of the Rod (1-10)

  FROM Helen in Egypt 1961

  (Composed 1952-1955)

  Palinode (Book One: 1-8; Book Two: 1-4)

  FROM HermeticDefinition 1972

  Winter Love 1959(2, 5, 6, 16, 19-21, 24, 25, 27, 28)

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  H.D. is the last of the great generation born in the 1880s to receive due recognition. Pound, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, all received early acclaim — notoriety at least, if not their just due; Marianne Moore developed a small but loyal following; and William Carlos Williams, after a long wait, now would find his poetry admired in the circles of the young in terms that equal the acclaim won long ago by his bitterly resented rival Eliot. Why has H.D. lagged behind?

  It is not simply because after the appearance of her first volume she became fixed, delimited, by the label Imagiste that Pound gave her in 1912, when he sent her early poems to Harriet Monroe for publication in Poetry. Pound, of course, never meant to trap her in this way; two years later he was publishing her famous “Oread” in the first issue of Blast as an example of “Vorticist” poetry. And indeed “H.D. Vorticist” would have been a better description of her early poetry, with its swirling, dynamic power: the sort of turbulent force that Gaudier-Brzeska described in his own sculptural definition of “Vortex”: “Plastic Soul is intensity of life bursting the plane.” Or better still, these early poems fit Pound’s description of the “image” as “a radiant node or cluster… a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”1 This restless movement, the constant surging of intense vitality, lies at the center of H.D.’s early poetry, and thus the static, lapidary, crystalline implications usually carried by the word imagism could never contain the strength of H.D.’s muse.

  Why, then, did the term cling to her poetry? Partly because H.D. continued to support the movement after Pound had given it over to Amy Lowell and “Amygism”; partly too because the critical and poetical currents of the 1920s and 1930s, under the influence of Eliot and Pound and T.E. Hulme, were violently reacting against romanticism and were insisting upon the need for terse, compact poetry, rich in imagistic inference but spare in abstraction and exclamation. Thus the concentrated imagery of poems such as “Pear Tree” or “Sea Rose” seemed to represent her essence, and her passionate protest against the “Sheltered Garden” could be overlooked.

  At the same time H.D. herself contributed to her delimitation and neglect by not publishing, or not collecting, her longer, more powerful, more personal poems, the sequences that showed, as Pound said in a famous footnote, that a “long vorticist poem” was indeed possible.2 “Amaranth,” “Eros,” and “Envy,” written in Dorset in 1916, out of her anguish at the infidelity of her husband, Richard Aldington, remained unpublished in their original form until 1968. In 1924 H.D. included cut-down versions of these poems under the guise of expansions of fragments from Sappho3; these and other poems with Sapphic titles accord with a change in her style of life, and express the problems of that change; but they served to confine her achievement by stressing her role as a translator or adapter of Grecian themes. The powerful assertion of her female identity in “Eurydice” (directed perhaps at D.H. Lawrence)4was published in The Egoist in 1917 — hardly a year for widespread recognition of a poem — but she did not include it in a volume until 1925, too late to remedy the fixation, “Imagiste,” in the public eye. And finally, some of the larger poems written during the 1930s, and now coming to be most admired, such as “The Dancer,” “The Master,” and “The Poet,” were not published at all or appeared only in magazines.

  But a deeper reason for the late coming of her reputation underlies all these lesser hindrances. Her basic theme, her basic message to the world, could not be appreciated, indeed, could hardly be heard, until the present time of woman’s struggle for liberation and equality. For this is the essential struggle that lies deep within her poetry.

  On the flyleaf of the bound typescript that preserves “Amaranth,” “Eros,” and “Envy,” H.D. has written: “from poems of The Islands series.” We have her poem “The Islands,” published in January, 1920, just before her restorative trip to Greece with Winifred Ellerman (Bryher): it is the poem of a deserted woman, an Ariadne on Naxos:

  What are the islands to me

  if you are lost,

  what is Paros to me

  if your eyes draw back,

  what is Milos

  if you take fright of beauty,

  terrible, torturous, isolated,

  a barren rock?

  what is Greece if you draw back

  from the terror

  and cold splendour of song

  and its bleak sacrifice?

  Another poem that seems to belong to this series (which might be labeled “Poems of Desertion and Despair”) may be “Toward the Piraeus,” published in 1924. The title suggests a poem written as the poet is moving toward the port of Athens and thinking of the disaster dealt with in the “Amaranth” triad. In any case the poem forms a sequel to this triad, a poem in which the poet finds the strength to open by denouncing men, to continue by recognizing the grave flaws in her lover, and to conclude by perceiving that the deeper cause of the disaster lay in her own nature, which had to guard her own sexual and poetical qualities against the pressures of the male, in this case, a faithless soldier-husband and a fellow-poet:

  It was not chastity that made me wild, but fear that my weapon, tempered in different heat, was over-matched by yours, and your hand skilled to yield death-blows, might break

  With the slightest turn — no ill will meant — my own lesser, yet still somewhat fine-wrought, fiery-tempered, delicate, over-passionate steel.

  It is a good self-assessment, a realization of the vulnerable fragility of her passionate strength.

  It was a strength that had within it a frightening intensity: frightening to the self, and to the man concerned, as she has implied in the passages just cited
from “The Islands.” It is a quality that she presents with terrifying intensity through the cries of “Cassandra,” praying to the god Hymen to be relieved of her burden of prophecy, begging to be wed, like other women:

  O Hymen king,

  lord, greatest, power, might,

  look for my face is dark,

  burnt with your light,

  your fire, O Hymen lord;

  is there none left

  can bear with me

  the kiss of your white fire?

  is there not one,

  Phrygian or frenzied Greek,

  poet, song-swept, or bard,

  one meet to take from me

  this bitter power of song,

  one fit to speak, Hymen,

  your praises, lord?

  May I not wed

  as you have wed?

  H.D. presents this aspect of her nature and her poetry in a splendid passage of the novel HERmione (HER), where the heroine is talking in the woods with George Lowndes, a figure clearly based on Ezra Pound. Although George calls her a tree-nymph, a “hamadryad,” she feels “George could never love a tree properly…. George doesn’t know what trees are…. George doesn’t know what I am.” 5 The differences that lead to this conclusion are dramatized in the woodland scene where the heroine challenges George to catch her, as she is about to run down a path described in images that mingle the green of trees with the swirling green of water:

  Her own thought, swifter than the thought of George, was there beyond him. “You’ll never, never catch me.” Her faced George with that, standing on the narrowest of woodpaths that twisted (she knew) a narrow trickle of earth-colour across the green and green that was the steady running of swift water, the steady sweeping and seeping and swirling of branches all about her. If George would catch her, then George would be, might yet be something. (p. 70)

  George declines the challenge, saying, “It’s too hot, Hermione.” But the heat, one supposes, is not so much the weather as the intensity of the girl challenging him; her vitality is more than he can meet, and he declines the match. Hermione then takes off in a turbulent mixture of wood and water images reminiscent of “Oread”:

  Heat seeped up, swept down, swirled about them with the green of branches that was torrid tropic water. Green torrid tropic water where no snow fell, where no hint of cold running streams from high mountains swept down, was swept into and under branches that made curious circle and half circle and whole circle…. Tree on tree on tree. TREE. I am the Tree of Life. Tree. I am a tree planted by the rivers of water. I am … I am … HER exactly.

  And as those biblical echoes give a transcendent tone to the scene, “Her caught Her to herself, swirled dynamically on flat heels and was off down the trickle of earth-colour that was the path cutting earth-colour through green pellucid water.” (p. 70)

  What the heroine of H.D.’s novel is discovering in the pervasive earth, wood, and water imagery is the force of her natural love for all created beings: tree or flower, wave or meadow, man or woman. Her creative powers depend upon her ability to enter into the nature of other beings, other creatures, and to feel all the world about her endowed with powers that have no earthly origin. “I am the Tree of Life.” The seed of that discovery is planted on the novel’s third page:

  The woods parted to show a space of lawn, running level with branches that, in early summer, were white with flower. Dogwood blossom. Pennsylvania. Names are in people, people are in names. Sylvania. I was born here. People ought to think before they call a place Sylvania.

  Pennsylvania. I am part of Sylvania. Trees. Trees. Trees. Dogwood, liriodendron with its green-yellow tulip blossoms. Trees are in people. People are in trees. Pennsylvania.

  Pound knew something of this. People ought to think before they call a person Dryad. Pound thought, and in the prison camp he found (in Canto 83) the power of that name, as he had felt it in the early poems of “Hilda’s Book” — the pamphlet of his love-poems that Ezra bound up and gave to Hilda in their Philadelphia days: “She hath some tree-born spirit of the wood/About her, and the wind is in her hair.” (“Rendez-vous”)6 In the context of “Hilda’s Book” and the tree-imagery of HERmione, Pound’s poem “The Tree” may be read as an appeal for mutual understanding, a declaration that the male speaker shares something of his Dryad’s mysterious source of knowledge and power. It is about the mystery of metamorphic union in love: Daphne transmuted into the laurel that crowns her lover Apollo and all poets, or Baucis and Philemon, united as two trees. Such mysteries of transformation cannot be performed without the power of mutual love:

  ’Twas not until the gods had been

  Kindly entreated and been brought within

  Unto the hearth of their hearts’ home

  That they might do this wonder thing.

  Naethless I have been a tree amid the wood

  And many new things understood

  That were rank folly to my head before.

  Of course he could not truly understand her, nor could Aldington, nor could Lawrence, nor could Cecil Gray — though Lawrence, being close to her in his response to life, might have come to understand her, if Frieda had not been on guard. H.D. was left alone.

  II

  Although the poems of “The Islands” series often seem despairing, their center is strong and it does not give way. The voice of Eurydice, after denouncing the ruthlessness and arrogance of her lover, retains the integrity of her self:

  At least I have the flowers of myself, and my thoughts, no god

  can take that;

  I have the fervour of myself for a presence

  and my own spirit for light…

  Such an attitude leads on to the major poems, some apparently and some certainly composed in the 1930s, especially the powerful triad, “The Dancer,” “The Master,” and “The Poet,” composed after her treatment by Freud in 1933 and 1934. “The Dancer,” perhaps in part evoking memories of Isadora Duncan’s Greek and erotic modes of dancing, is her supreme assertion of woman’s integrity as artist and sexual force (the two are for H.D., as for Lawrence and Duncan, inseparable). This poem leads directly into “The Master,” a tribute to Freud much franker than her prose tribute, for it deals openly with her bisexuality (“I had two loves separate”) and also shows her disagreement with Freud’s diagnosis of her need for a male to sustain her. But she is grateful, deeply grateful, to Freud for his confidence in her creative gift: “You are a poet”, “you are a poet” — she repeats his words, as a sign of the reassurance that he gave her, and a sign of how, as she says, “it was he himself, he who set me free/to prophesy.” Free from self-doubt — to prophesy — what? To prophesy the freedom of woman from bondage to the male, but not alienation from the male, as her moving tribute to “The Poet” shows in the third poem of this triptych. The poet concerned is, almost certainly, Lawrence, as the allusion to the “small coptic temple” indicates with its apparent reference to the “shrine” on the mountain above Taos. The delicate balance of attitudes displayed in this triad has not been easily achieved, as we may see from the long poem “Calypso” (or “Callypso”, to use H.D.’s spelling), known since 1938 from its brief second part, which H.D. published in Poetry under the caption “From Episode I.” This part, by itself, creates a sharp, ironical contrast between Calypso’s bitter denunciation of Odysseus as a forgetful brute, and the attitude revealed by his own speech, where he is sensitively remembering her generous favors. As published complete in 1983, the whole of “Calypso” presents a highly complex dialogue, or set of monologues, on the invasion of female privacy and peace by the male force. Literally, at the outset, Calypso is speaking as she watches Odysseus land and climb up the cliff, but the sudden shift at the close of this part, along with the strong sexual images throughout, make it plain that what we are watching is the sexual encounter itself, resisted by the female, forced by the male, and ending with both at peace, the male asleep with the woman’s “hair spread on his chest,” and the woman saying “he shall n
ever get away.” The whole poem represents a complex weaving of sexual themes: resistance, violence, peace, possessiveness, severance, anger, sadness.

  Both man and woman have combined to create the saving of the gift for H.D. Bryher saved her in 1919 when, after the birth of her daughter, the deaths of her brother and father, and the breaking with Aldington and Lawrence, she is near death, both physically and mentally. Her tribute to Bryher appears in the sequence “Let Zeus Record,” published in Red Roses for Bronze (1931); it speaks, with love and admiration, of a relationship that is ending. Red Roses for Bronze concludes with both an “Epitaph” and a “Renaissance Choros” (“The Mysteries”) — “Renaissance” suggesting both a new era of culture and a time for personal rebirth under the power of the religious faith and figure represented in the “voice” that speaks out of the dark turbulence of the opening section: “peace / be still” — the words of Christ (Mark 4:39) that calm the storm at sea. The poem continues with allusions to the Gospels, especially to the parables, combining these with allusions to the pagan mystery cults as the “voice” concludes:

  “The mysteries remain,

  I keep the same

  cycle of seed-time

  and of sun and rain;

  Demeter in the grass I multiply, renew and bless Iacchus in the vine…

  I keep the law,

  I hold the mysteries true,

  I am the vine,

  the branches, you

  and you.”

  This concluding poem of 1931 is closely linked, both in style and in subject, with the poem “The Magician” (Christ is called a “magician” in the second section of “The Mysteries”), published in an obscure magazine in January, 1933, two months before H.D. began her treatments with Freud. This poem is spoken in the person of a disciple of Christ who has heard his words and witnessed his miracles, and who now places reliance, not upon the symbols of the Crucifixion, but upon the images of nature that appear in the parables: nature as a channel toward the divine. Both the ending of Red Roses for Bronze and “The Magician” show that H.D. had not utterly lost her creative powers when she sought help from Freud. She was capable of writing well, and Freud seems to have realized that her condition did not require the sort of deep analysis that would occupy years. A few months of advice would, and did, suffice to bring forth an immense surge of creative power, represented in “The Dancer” triad and in the completion of her long-contemplated version of the Ion of Euripides, published in 1937.