Trilogy (New Directions Classic)
TRILOGY
The Walls Do Not Fall
Tribute to the Angels
The Flowering of the Rod
by H.D.
Introduction and Readers’ Notes
by Aliki Barnstone
A New Directions Book
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE WALLS DO NOT FALL
TRIBUTE TO THE ANGELS
THE FLOWERING OF THE ROD
READERS’ NOTES
A NOTE ON H.D.’S LIFE
INTRODUCTION
In Tribute to Freud, H.D. asks, “Do I wish myself, in the deepest unconscious or subconscious layers of my being, to be the founder of a new religion?” Trilogy is H.D.’s complex answer to this question. If with this astonishing book of poetry H.D. does not establish a new religion, she certainly “makes it new” while creating an eclectic scripture that derives from Egyptian, Greek, and biblical traditions. Despite her enormous output and radical poetics, H.D.’s reputation lingers unfairly back in the early decades of the century, under the restrictive label of “Imagist,” one which she adamently rejected. Trilogy, however, (1944) establishes her as a major poet among the other modernists—a large-minded and philosophical visionary. Like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Trilogy is an epic poem that takes the reader on the poet’s political, spiritual, philosophical, and artistic quest. Each poet, like their precursors Milton, Whitman, and Baudelaire, has composed a personal bible; Trilogy is H.D.’s multi-layered sacred text.
In comparing Trilogy to her earlier work, H.D. wrote: “This is not the ‘crystalline’ poetry that my early critics would insist on. It is no pillar of salt nor yet of hewn rock-crystal. It is the pillar of fire by night, the pillar of cloud by day.”1 She refers to the story of the children of Israel escaping Egypt in Exodus 13.21: “And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night.” Her poem, she implies, is an incarnation of God’s words, showing the path. She asks the reader to venerate both her voice and the figure of Woman as poet, mystical seer, and god.
H.D. wrote Trilogy during World War II. She had not left London during the German bombing of the city. “The orgy of destructions … to be witnessed and lived through in London, that outer threat and constant reminder of death,” she wrote, “drove me inward” (NHP, v).2 So The Walls Do Not Fall begins with
An incident [bombing] here and there,
and rails gone (for guns)
from your (and my) old town square.
In a letter to Norman Holmes Pearson, she reflects upon her comparison of London to Egypt in the first section of Walls; the ruins of both places expose the relics of our unconscious worlds:
The parallel between ancient Egypt and ‘ancient’ London is obvious. In [section] I the ‘fallen roof leaves the sealed room open to the air’ is of course true of our own house of life—outer violence touching the deepest hidden subconscious terrors, etc., and we see so much of our past ‘on show’, as it were ‘another sliced wall where poor utensils show like rare objects in a museum’. Egypt? London? Mystery, majic—that I have found in London! (NHP, vii).
H.D. read the mystery in the signs—or the hieroglyphs left in the ruins—“two ways,” as she might say: as terror and as magic. Out of the “orgy of destructions” which “drove her inward,” she wrote a book of hope, a book of life, and a scripture for a new religion. Trilogy asserts the power of the word over the sword, for “without idea and the Word’s mediation, // [the sword] would have remained / unmanifest.” While the German planes roared overhead, bombs falling, she heard a more powerful voice, which she calls “Dream / Vision”:
though there was whirr and roar in the high air
there was a Voice louder.
Trilogy synthesizes the Judeo-Christian tradition (including Gnosticism) with the Egyptian and Greek pagan traditions. H.D.’s book reveals that the gods, goddesses, and the figures in the Bible are
the same—different—the same attributes,
different yet the same as before.
She brings together the old and the new, the scientific and pragmatic, and the esoteric and mystical. The differences between people—especially their religious differences—ignite war. Trilogy shows that differences are also similarities or affinities that, with enlightenment, can ignite love rather than war, creation rather than destruction—and resurrection out of Apocalypse:
chasm, schism in consciousness
must be bridged over;
we are each, householder,
each with a treasure
Love, which brings difference together in harmony, is the answer: “only love is holy.” Jesus Christ is the divine embodiment of love; so too and with equal importance is the woman god: Isis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus, Mary, The Lady.
As the poem itself points out, Trilogy is a “palimpsest, ” in which one might see the old writing under the new, beneath layers of transparencies. This quality of being “different yet the same as before” intentionally mimics the typological structure of the Bible, which is itself a palimpsest of pre-biblical legends. The New Testament gospels are reworkings of Old Testament texts and of each other. H.D. writes:
In no wise is the pillar-of-fire
that went before
different from the pillar-of-fire
that comes after …
Here, she refers to the pillars-of-fire in both the Old and New Testaments. The old pillar-of-fire is the light given Moses and the children of Israel by the Lord at night as they escape from Egypt; the new is the angel of Revelation whose feet are pillars-of-fire. H.D. bridges the “schism in consciousness” by revealing that the light of God is always the light of God, whether it is ancient Egyptian or Greek, Old or New Testament, male or female.
Trilogy is also deeply informed by H.D.’s work as an analysand with Sigmund Freud3 She calls him “this old Janus, this beloved light-house keeper, old Captain January.”4 Janus was the God who faced two ways and was the guardian of doorways and roads. Freud was guardian of the doorway between the conscious and unconscious minds. H.D.’s book, Tribute to Freud, is indeed a tribute to the man who revolutionized the way human consciousness is understood. It is also a guide to H.D.’s own philosophy and poetics, as can be seen in her interpretation of Freud’s philosophy of dreams:
He had said, he had dared to say that the dream had its worth and value in translatable terms, not the dream merely of a Pharaoh or a Pharaoh’s butler, not the dream merely of the favorite child of Israel, not merely Joseph’s dream or Jacob’s dream of a symbolic ladder, not the dream only of the Cumaean Sybil of Italy or the Delphic Priestess of ancient Greece, but the dream of everyone, everywhere. He had dared to say that the dream came from an unexplored depth in man’s consciousness and that this unexplored depth ran like a great stream or ocean underground, and the vast depth of that ocean was the same vast depth that today, as in Joseph’s day, overflowing in man’s small consciousness, produced inspiration, madness, creative idea, or the dregs of the dreariest symptoms of mental unrest and disease. He had dared to say that it was the same ocean of universal consciousness, and even if not stated in so many words, he had dared to imply that this consciousness proclaimed all men one; all nations and races met in the universal world of the dream; and he had dared to say that the dream-symbol could be interpreted; its language, its imagery were common to the whole race, not only of the living but of those ten thousand years dead. The picture-writing, the hieroglyph of the dream, was the common property of the whole race; in the dream, man, as at the beginning of time, spoke a universal langu
age, and man, meeting in the universal understanding of the unconscious or the subconscious, would forgo barriers of time and space, and man, understanding man, would save mankind. (TF, 71)
In her elegantly passionate distillation of Freud, she reveals her absorption in his theories as well as her own departures from them. She incorporates Freud’s ideas into her philosophy, yet she does so on her own terms: “But there was an argument implicit in our very bones.” For all her admiration for his prophetic discoveries, H.D. asserts: “I was a student, working under the direction of the greatest mind of this and perhaps many succeeding generations. But the Professor was not always right” (TF, 18). The “hieroglyph of the dream” includes religious figures, both biblical and pagan. For Freud these are figures revealed through empirical psychological methods, whose significance is not transcendental but scientific: “[He) shut the door on transcendental speculations or at least transferred this occult or hidden symbolism to the occult or hidden regions of personal reactions, dreams…. It was the human individual that concerned him, its individual reactions to the problems of every-day” (TF, 102). Freud was concerned with bringing up the materials of the unconscious so that the individual could live rationally, not driven by the destructive forces of the unconscious. In contrast, H.D. ruminates on “what happened when this life was over” (TF, 102). She believes that the hieroglyph of the dream translates into otherworldly, spiritual signs. The dream is as Emerson, her philosophical soul-mate, puts it: “a temple whose walls are covered with emblems, pictures and commandments of the Deity.”5
In 1920 on the island of Corfu in Greece, on the wall of her hotel room, H.D. saw a vision, which she calls the writing-on-the-wall. She notes: “There had been writing-on-walls before, in Biblical, in classic literature. At least, all through time, there had been a tradition of warnings or messages from another world or another state of being” (TF, 50). H.D. refers here to the biblical story of the prophet Daniel who interpreted King Belshazzar’s vision of a hand writing on a wall. The writing prophesied disaster, for it said, “God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it…. In that night was Belshazzar the king of the Chaldean slain” (Daniel 5.25 & 30). On one level, H.D.’s writing-on-the-wall foretold the threat of the Germans starting World War II. On another, it is a religious vision, a kind of hope or answer that provides the material of her own luminous poetry.
Freud reads H.D.’s vision on the wall as “megalomania … a hidden desire to ‘found a new religion’…. ‘a dangerous symptom’” (TF, 51). H.D. responds that regardless of the label, “symptom or inspiration, the writing continues to write itself or be written” (TF, 51). H.D. has a holistic vision in which poetry, especially her own prophetic poetry, “can be translated into terms of today … common to the whole race” (TF, 51). She observes that religion, art, and medicine have become increasingly separated and she imagines:
These three working together, to form a new vehicle of expression or new form of thing or of living, might be symbolized by the tripod…. The tripod … was the symbol of prophesy … the Priestess of Pythoness of Delphi sat on the tripod while she pronounced her verse couplets, the famous Delphic utterances which it was said could be read two ways. (TF, 51)
In Trilogy H.D. synthesizes the three disciplines of religion, art, and medicine, figuring herself as the Priestess and as the scribe.
As a poet she identifies with the Egyptian Thoth and the Alexandrian Hermes Trismegistes, the mystical scribes, messengers, and healers. She remarks that dreams “are healing. They are real” (TF, 35). Likewise, in Trilogy she puts forth the imperative to “rededicate our gifts / to spiritual realism” and to pay homage to the Thoth/Hermes, who will “lead us back to the one-truth.” She instructs us to prepare our writing tools and transcribe:
scrape a palette,
point pen or brush,
prepare papyrus or parchment,
offer incense to Thoth,
the original Ancient-of-days,
Hermes-thrice-great.
As the scribe or transcriber of the writing-on-the-wall, or the hieroglyph of the dream, the poet has special sight. H.D. wishes through her “spiritual realism” to show that those who claim that “poets are useless” are wrong. Poets speak a universal language that is the hope of humanity.
In keeping with her belief that Freud’s reading of the unconscious “would save mankind,” H.D. compared him to the other savior, Jesus: “There was another Jew who said, the kingdom of heaven is within you” (TF, 104). In Trilogy H.D. creates a poetics combining the salvific forces of Freud and Jesus Christ. A recurrent trope of the book is that it is “a tale of a Fisherman,” a biblical reference which can be found in the gospels: “Now as he walked by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew his brother casting a net into the sea: for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men” (Mk 1.16-17). Jesus says that Simon and Andrew will draw to them human souls; similarly, H.D. sees Freud as a fisher of human souls because by exploring the ocean of the unconscious, he discovers the “pearl-of-great-price”:
the shark-jaws
of outer circumstance
will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.
In a Freudian context, the “pearl-of-great-price“is the self which “living within” is protected from “outer circumstance.” Yet the pearl-of-great-price is from one of Jesus’s parables in which a merchant sells all he has to buy it. The kingdom of heaven is like a net cast into the sea which, “when it was full, they drew to shore, and sat down, and gathered the good into vessels, but cast the bad away. So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just” (Matthew 13.45-49). There is a cosmic difference between the inner worlds of Freud and H.D.: for H.D., the pearl-of-great-price is not the Freudian secular self, but the self which, by journeying within and shunning the evils of “outer circumstance,” finds within the soul “the kingdom of heaven.”
If H.D. incorporates Freud into her work on her own terms, she also does so with Jesus. Jesus is just one among the prophets, visionaries, and gods who populate Trilogy’s pantheon. The poet wishes to “re-light the flame” of womanly vision and of the goddesses. Like Janus, “Gods always face two ways,” toward the past and the future. So in Trilogy the Virgin Mary faces the past, becoming Isis, Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus, and she faces the future, immortalized as the Lady of H.D.’s vision. H.D. draws a connection between the denigration of the goddesses as “harlots” and “old flesh-pots” and the disparagement of women writers. She has high ambitions for poetry as a universal healing and regenerative force. The exclusion of women from the spirit or the word implies a terrible “schism in consciousness,” to use her words.
In Tribute to the Angels the speaker has a vision of the Lady, who is a synthesis of all the holy women who have been portrayed in art, and all the goddesses, including Eve and Mary. “She carries a book” and, in these Gnostic lines, she redeems the feminine aspect of the soul and Eve:
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;
your Holy Ghost was an apple-tree
smouldering—or rather now bourgeoning
with flowers; the fruit of the Tree?
this is the new Eve who comes
clearly to return, to retrieve
what she lost the race,
given over to sin, to death;
she brings the Book of Life, obviously.
This poem combines Gnosticism with H.D.’s Moravian background in order to redeem Eve for her sinless knowledge and independence—and to redeem women since they are blamed for Eve’s “sin.” Historically, the Moravian church,
in which H.D. was raised, exalted the feminine. Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church, was denounced as a heretic for claiming that the human soul was female, anima rather than animus, and connecting the soul with Sophia, the female Holy Spirit of Gnosticism. Susan Friedman explains: “Many Moravians were burned for witchcraft, but they continued to worship secretly with a cup decorated with an ‘S.’ This ‘S’ did not represent the serpent of the Devil, but an earlier serpent symbol that signified the ‘Sanctus Spiritus, the Holy Spirit.’”6
In the writing-on-the-wall, H.D. saw these Moravian and Gnostic symbols: “The S or half-S faces the angel; that is, the series of the S-pattern opens out in the direction of the angel; they are like question marks … this inverted S-pattern may have represented a series of question marks, the questions that have been asked through the ages, that the ages will go on asking” (TF, 55). These eternal questions are Gnostic (which means one who knows), since they point to a quest for knowledge. The S of the serpent is also Gnostic, since the serpent is holy, urging Eve to seek knowledge. Eve is a savior because she gave knowledge, the fruit of the Tree, to humanity. The traditional Eve of the Bible lost immortality and respect and veneration. In H.D.’s revision “the new Eve … comes / clearly to retrieve / what she lost.” The new Eve has transformed her punishment. No longer “given over to sin, to death; / she brings the Book of Life, obviously.” The burned-out apple tree, a recurrent motif in Trilogy, is “now bourgeoning / with flowers.” And the flowers are the flowers of rebirth, resurrection, and immortality which grow from Eve’s knowledge and, it is implied, from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.