Trilogy (New Directions Classic) Read online

  Eve’s “Book of Life” appears two sections later, transformed into possibility, hope for freedom, and beauty, and the future:

  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;

  but she is not shut up in a cave

  like a Sibyl; she is not

  imprisoned in leaden bars

  in a coloured window;

  she is Psyche, the butterfly,

  out of the cocoon.

  The Lady is not “imprisoned in leaden bars / in a coloured window.” That is, she is not the Lady portrayed by the stained glass in church, nor is she limited to the objectification and trap of artistic images. She is unlike the Sybil caught for centuries in a cave, who, despite her prophetic knowledge, wishes to die rather than to live. The Lady has advanced beyond “the tome of ancient wisdom,” for the pages of her book are the pages of new creations: “the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new.” H.D., as all writers must do to make their words live, invites her reader to recreate the text of Trilogy. (Without a reader, a text is merely an object with no consciousness, no anima.) The Word of poetry is regenerative; Trilogy is not a closed text, written for itself, but one that opens up the Book of Life, and shows the reader the blank pages on which she or he can write “the new.” When the Lady becomes “Psyche, the butterfly, / out of the cocoon,” the spirit is free to fly, displaying, creating, and recreating the beauty of the soul. Open Trilogy and you will see, rising from between the ink and the blank spaces in the pages, H.D.’s Psyche, her butterfly.

  * * *

  This project grew directly from my teaching Trilogy. I discovered that without an understanding of H.D.’s references, students found Trilogy too elusive and mystifying to appreciate. I asked them to look up her references and make glossaries. The result was a turnaround. With the power of knowledge my students experienced the exhilaration of engaging with this philosophically complex and difficult text.

  In my annotations, I have tried to be informative, not interpretive, though I acknowledge that the annotations themselves are a form of interpretation. Since H.D. weaves into her text an encyclopedic knowledge of the occult, mythology, esoteric religion, Gnosticism, and the Bible, the task of annotating Trilogy is probably limitless. My goal has been not to provide a gloss for each line of the poem, but to illuminate the most important allusions. Annotating Trilogy has taught me that seeking the sources is part of the reading experience of the book. By sending her readers to other works, H.D. sends them on an intertextual journey that helps them recreate the text, and, in some measure, her own creative process. I would like to suggest, however, that you read Trilogy once without consulting the notes, then read again allowing the notes to inform your own intuitive response.

  My hope is that this annotation will make Trilogy more accessible to readers, and that teachers will be encouraged to have the heady experience of teaching one of the stunning poems of the century.

  I wish to thank Willis Barnstone, Kathleen Crown, Shannon Doyne, and Elizabeth Sahm-Kelly for their invaluable assistance. And I owe special gratitude to Perdita Schaffner for permitting me voyage.

  Aliki Barnstone

  Lewisburg, Pennsylvania

  March 1998

  * * *

  1 Quoted in Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981), p. 8.

  2 NHP is the abbreviation for Norman Holmes Pearson’s foreword to the first New Direcctions edition of Trilogy.

  3 For extensive analysis of H.D. and Freud, see Susan Friedman, Diane Chisholm, H.D. ’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), and Clare Buck, H.D. & Freud: Bisexuality and a Feminine Discourse (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1991).

  4 Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 102.

  5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet” in Complete Writings (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1929), p. 243. Significantly, both Emerson and H.D. use the lexicon of John’s Revelation. See Tribute to the Angels, p. 64.

  6 Friedman, p. 183.

  THE WALLS DO NOT FALL

  To Bryher

  for Karnak 1923

  from London 1942

  [1]

  An incident here and there,

  and rails gone (for guns)

  from your (and my) old town square:

  mist and mist-grey, no colour,

  still the Luxor bee, chick and hare

  pursue unalterable purpose

  in green, rose-red, lapis;

  they continue to prophesy

  from the stone papyrus:

  there, as here, ruin opens

  the tomb, the temple; enter,

  there as here, there are no doors:

  the shrine lies open to the sky,

  the rain falls, here, there

  sand drifts; eternity endures:

  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;

  shivering overtakes us,

  as of old, Samuel:

  trembling at a known street-corner,

  we know not nor are known;

  the Pythian pronounces—we pass on

  to another cellar, to another sliced wall

  where poor utensils show

  like rare objects in a museum;

  Pompeii has nothing to teach us,

  we know crack of volcanic fissure,

  slow flow of terrible lava,

  pressure on heart, lungs, the brain

  about to burst its brittle case

  (what the skull can endure!):

  over us, Apocryphal fire,

  under us, the earth sway, dip of a floor,

  slope of a pavement

  where men roll, drunk

  with a new bewilderment,

  sorcery, bedevilment:

  the bone-frame was made for

  no such shock knit within terror,

  yet the skeleton stood up to it:

  the flesh? it was melted away,

  the heart burnt out, dead ember,

  tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,

  yet the frame held:

  we passed the flame: we wonder

  what saved us? what for?

  [2]

  Evil was active in the land,

  Good was impoverished and sad;

  Ill promised adventure,

  Good was smug and fat;

  Dev-ill was after us,

  tricked up like Jehovah;

  Good was the tasteless pod,

  stripped from the manna-beans, pulse, lentils:

  they were angry when we were so hungry

  for the nourishment, God;

  they snatched off our amulets,

  charms are not, they said, grace;

  but gods always face two-ways,

  so let us search the old highways

  for the true-rune, the right-spell,

  recover old values;

  nor listen if they shout out,

  your beauty, Isis, Aset or Astarte,

  is a harlot; you are retrogressive,

  zealot, hankering after old flesh-pots;

  your heart, moreover,

  is a dead canker,

  they continue, and

  your rhythm is the devil’s hymn,

  your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,

  how can you scratch out

  indelible ink of the palimpsest

  of past misadventure?

  [3]

  Let us, however, recover the Sceptre,

  the rod of power:

&nb
sp; it is crowned with the lily-head

  or the lily-bud:

  it is Caduceus; among the dying

  it bears healing:

  or evoking the dead,

  it brings life to the living.

  [4]

  There is a spell, for instance,

  in every sea-shell:

  continuous, the sea thrust

  is powerless against coral,

  bone, stone, marble

  hewn from within by that craftsman,

  the shell-fish:

  oyster, clam, mollusc

  is master-mason planning

  the stone marvel:

  yet that flabby, amorphous hermit

  within, like the planet

  senses the finite,

  it limits its orbit

  of being, its house,

  temple, fane, shrine:

  it unlocks the portals

  at stated intervals:

  prompted by hunger,

  it opens to the tide-flow:

  but infinity? no,

  of nothing-too-much:

  I sense my own limit,

  my shell-jaws snap shut

  at invasion of the limitless,

  ocean-weight; infinite water

  can not crack me, egg in egg-shell;

  closed in, complete, immortal

  full-circle, I know the pull

  of the tide, the lull

  as well as the moon;

  the octopus-darkness

  is powerless against

  her cold immortality;

  so I in my own way know

  that the whale

  can not digest me:

  be firm in your own small, static, limited

  orbit and 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.

  [5]

  When in the company of the gods,

  I loved and was loved,

  never was my mind stirred

  to such rapture,

  my heart moved

  to such pleasure,

  as now, to discover

  over Love, a new Master:

  His, the track in the sand

  from a plum-tree in flower

  to a half-open hut-door,

  (or track would have been

  but wind blows sand-prints from the sand,

  whether seen or unseen):

  His, the Genius in the jar

  which the Fisherman finds,

  He is Mage,

  bringing myrrh.

  [6]

  In me (the worm) clearly

  is no righteousness, but this—

  persistence; I escaped spider-snare,

  bird-claw, scavenger bird-beak,

  clung to grass-blade,

  the back of a leaf

  when storm-wind

  tore it from its stem;

  I escaped, I explored

  rose-thorn forest,

  was rain-swept

  down the valley of a leaf;

  was deposited on grass,

  where mast by jewelled mast

  bore separate ravellings

  of encrusted gem-stuff

  of the mist

  from each banner-staff:

  unintimidated by multiplicity

  of magnified beauty,

  such as your gorgon-great

  dull eye can not focus

  nor compass, I profit

  by every calamity;

  I eat my way out of it;

  gorged on vine-leaf and mulberry,

  parasite, I find nourishment:

  when you cry in disgust,

  a worm on the leaf,

  a worm in the dust,

  a worm on the ear-of-wheat,

  I am yet unrepentant,

  for I know how the Lord God

  is about to manifest, when I,

  the industrious worm,

  spin my own shroud.

  [7]

  Gods, goddesses

  wear the winged head-dress

  of horns, as the

  butterfly antennae,

  or the erect king-cobra crest

  to show how the worm turns

  [8]

  So we reveal our status

  with twin-horns, disk, erect serpent,

  though these or the double-plume or lotus

  are, you now tell us, trivial

  intellectual adornment;

  poets are useless,

  more than that,

  we, authentic relic,

  bearers of the secret wisdom,

  living remnant

  of the inner band

  of the sanctuaries’ initiate,

  are not only ‘non-utilitarian’,

  we are ‘pathetic’:

  this is the new heresy;

  but if you do not even understand what words say,

  how can you expect to pass judgement

  on what words conceal?

  yet the ancient rubrics reveal that

  we are back at the beginning:

  you have a long way to go,

  walk carefully, speak politely

  to those who have done their worm-cycle,

  for gods have been smashed before

  and idols and their secret is stored

  in man’s very speech,

  in the trivial or

  the real dream; insignia

  in the heron’s crest,

  the asp’s back,

  enigmas, rubrics promise as before,

  protection for the scribe;

  he takes precedence of the priest,

  stands second only to the Pharoah.

  [9]

  Thoth, Hermes, the stylus,

  the palette, the pen, the quill endure,

  though our books are a floor

  of smouldering ash under our feet;

  though the burning of the books remains

  the most perverse gesture

  and the meanest

  of man’s mean nature,

  yet give us, they still cry,

  give us books,

  folio, manuscript, old parchment

  will do for cartridge cases;

  irony is bitter truth

  wrapped up in a little joke,

  and Hatshepsut’s name is still circled

  with what they call the cartouche.

  [10]

  But we fight for life,

  we fight, they say, for breath,

  so what good are your scribblings?

  this—we take them with us

  beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth

  invented the script, letters, palette;

  the indicated flute or lyre-notes

  on papyrus or parchment

  are magic, indelibly stamped

  on the atmosphere somewhere,

  forever; remember, O Sword,

  you are the younger brother, the latter-born,

  your Triumph, however exultant,

  must one day be over,

  in the beginning

  was the Word.

  [11]

  Without thought, invention,

  you would not have been, O Sword,

  without idea and the Word’s mediation,

  you would have remained

  unmanifest in the dim dimension

  where thought dwells,

  and beyond thought and idea,

  their begetter,

  Dream,

  Vision.

  [12]

  So, in our secretive, sly way,

  we are proud and chary

  of companionship with you others,

  our betters, who seem to imply

  that we will soon be swept aside,

  crumpled rags, no good for banner-stuff,

  no fit length for a bandage;

&nb
sp; but when the shingles hissed

  in the rain of incendiary,

  other values were revealed to us,

  other standards hallowed us;

  strange texture, a wing covered us,

  and though there was whirr and roar in the high air,

  there was a Voice louder,

  though its speech was lower

  than a whisper.

  [13]

  The Presence was spectrum-blue,

  ultimate blue ray,

  rare as radium, as healing;

  my old self, wrapped round me,

  was shroud (I speak of myself individually

  but I was surrounded by companions

  in this mystery);

  do you wonder we are proud,

  aloof,

  indifferent to your good and evil?

  peril, strangely encountered, strangely endured,

  marks us;

  we know each other

  by secret symbols,

  though, remote, speechless,

  we pass each other on the pavement,

  at the turn of the stair;

  though no word pass between us,

  there is subtle appraisement;

  even if we snarl a brief greeting

  or do not speak at all,

  we know our Name,

  we nameless initiates,

  born of one mother,

  companions

  of the flame.

  [14]

  Yet we, the latter-day twice-born,

  have our bad moments when

  dragging the forlorn

  husk of self after us,

  we are forced to confess to

  malaise and embarrassment;

  we pull at this dead shell,

  struggle but we must wait

  till the new Sun dries off

  the old-body humours;

  awkwardly, we drag this stale

  old will, old volition, old habit

  about with us;

  we are these people,

  wistful, ironical, wilful,

  who have no part in

  new-world reconstruction,

  in the confederacy of labour,

  the practical issues of art

  and the cataloguing of utilities:

  O, do not look up