"H. D. and Imagism" is the second part of the third installment of a series that focuses on poetic development in the United States. You may want to read "Pound and Imagism," the first part of the third installment. The second installment is a superficial examination of realism; the first installment is a superficial examination of romanticism.
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1886 to an academic family with connections to the Moravian and Puritan faiths. Her father was an astronomer and mathematician who taught initially at Lehigh University and later at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1901, when Doolittle was fifteen years old, she met Ezra Pound, who lived nearby and who later introduced her to William Carlos Williams when the two men were students at the University of Pennsylvania and she was at Bryn Mawr College. Doolittle's engagement to Pound in 1905 was condemned by her parents, and she withdrew from Bryn Mawr the next year, studying at home until she joined Pound in London in 1911. Doolittle actively participated in the city's literary scene--associating with, among others, W. B. Yeats, May Sinclair, D. H. Lawrence, and Richard Aldington, whom she married in 1913.
Pound sent to Harriet Monroe three poems by Doolittle for publication in the January 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Submitted under the nom de plume "H. D., Imagiste," "Hermes of the Ways," "Priapus," and "Epigram" were hailed by reviewers as revolutionary. "Hermes of the Ways" embodies Pound's concept of imagism, for it contains elements of classical poetry, Japanese haiku, and French symbolism:
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it
Are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves
Break over it.
But more than the many-foamed ways
Of the sea,
I know him
Of the triple path-ways,
Hermes,
Who awaiteth.
Dubious,
Facing three ways,
Welcoming wayfarers,
He whom the sea-orchard
Shelters from the west,
From the east
Weathers sea-wind;
Fronts the great dunes.
Wind rushes
Over the dunes,
And the coarse, salt-crusted grass
Answers.
Heu,
It whips round my ankles!
II
Small is
This white stream,
Flowing below ground
From the poplar-shaded hill,
But the water is sweet.
Apples on the small trees
Are hard,
Too small,
Too late ripened
By a desperate sun
That struggles through sea-mist.
The boughs of the trees
Are twisted
By many bafflings;
Twisted are
The small-leafed boughs.
But the shadow of them
Is not the shadow of the mast head
Nor of the torn sails.
Hermes, Hermes,
The great sea foamed,
Gnashed its teeth about me;
But you have waited,
Where sea-grass tangles with
Shore-grass.1
Pound regarded highly the exactness of detail, the economy of language, and the organic patterns of rhythm. After the publication of the three poems, H. D. assumed a major role in the movement. She was a significant contributor to Des Imagistes (1914), an anthology edited by Pound, and she replaced Aldington, during World War I, as the literary editor of The Egoist, a forum for imagist writers. When Pound abandoned imagism to support vorticism, H. D. helped further the movement, submitting material for Amy Lowell's anthology Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917). Her volume Sea Garden (1916) is distinctively imagistic and transcendental; she uses natural imagery--wind, sand, flowers, et cetera--to examine the subjectivities of consciousness.
By mid 1919, H. D. had experienced a stillbirth, her marriage had dissolved, she had been impregnated again, her brother Gilbert had been killed in World War I, her father had died from shock, she had been infected with a deadly strain of influenza, she had borne her daughter Perdita, and she had become romantically involved with Winifred Ellerman, an English novelist who wrote under the pseudonym Bryher. They traveled to Greece, the United States, Switzerland, Egypt, and Paris--during which H. D. published translations of Euripides, Sappho, Homer, and other Greek writers as well as the books Hymen (1921), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Collected Poems of H. D. (1925), Palimpsest (1926), Hedylus (1928), and Red Roses for Bronze (1931). Both Hymen and Heliodora epitomize imagism with their common speech, concrete images, concision, and variant rhythms. Indeed, when Collected Poems appeared, she seemed to many the one poet who had remained essentially an imagist. But with Palimpsest and Hedylus, H. D. began to experiment with different genres and techniques, employing increasingly complex rhymes and rhythms to recreate moods and objects.
In 1933 and 1934, she underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, Austria. The process was pivotal in her artistic development. According to Tribute to Freud (1956), her memoir of the experience, H. D. resolved many of her feelings concerning her bisexuality and her difficulties with writer's block. Psychoanalysis also prompted H. D. to perceive her experiences as part of a universal pattern that linked her to women throughout history and to regard her poetry as the key to understanding that pattern. Throughout her life, relief from traumas derived from her ability to locate in Greek and Egyptian myths and in esoteric religions, particularly those emphasizing the strength and independence of matriarchal figures, the archetypes for her own experience and to project her life into myth: evinced in the poems of her early phase--Sea Garden, Hymen, and Heliodora--in the impressionistic fiction of her middle phase--Palimpsest, Hedylus, Nights (1935), and HERmione (published posthumously in 1981)--and in the memoirs--Tribute to Freud and End to Torment: A Memoir of Pound (published posthumously in 1979)--and the poetic sequences--Trilogy (published separately and together in 1973), Helen in Egypt (1961), and Hermetic Definition (published posthumously in 1972)--of her last phase.
The fiction of her middle period taught H. D. to cluster images in a larger narrative framework, and she expanded both form and perspective in the wartime trilogy The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to the Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). Trilogy was inspired by the realities of living in London during World War II and concerns religion and myth in a series of discursive meditations. H. D. presents the Goddess, or mother-symbol, as a means of transcending the horrors of war and of attaining spiritual wholeness and self-realization. Robert Ambelain's spiritual themes and Denis de Rougemont's L'Amour et l'Occident (Love in the Western World, 1939) convinced H. D. that an underground mystical tradition had been existing throughout history. Raised in a Moravian community in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she perceived a connection with the syncretic tradition. The various forms of mysticism, H. D. believed, differed significantly from the orthodox religions that had oppressed them. One important area of contrast was the place of woman as symbol in the pantheon. Whereas the orthodox traditions had created a masculine imagery of God and had been using such to rationalize their belief in male superiority, the mystical traditions posited an equally masculine and feminine divine One--for example, the En-Soph of the Kabbalah. Furthermore, the gods and goddesses of myth are dualistic. It is important to note that the masculine and feminine duality governs all other dualisms such as life-death, spirit-flesh, light-dark, good-evil, active-passive, reason-emotion, et cetera.
H. D.'s engagement in myth and mysticism liberated her from the imagery of patriarchal monotheism. But she realized that if the Goddess were to function as a symbol of mystical Love, she had to revise the syncretic tradition, for the dualisms of Gnosticism and the Kabbalah tend to equate the Female Principle with death, flesh, darkness, evil and passivity. H. D. revised the dualisms, associating the Male Principle with death, with the technology and machinery of modern warfare. The Goddess, now embodying Love (life, peace and rebirth), afforded the possibility to develop a personal and mythic mother-symbol of salvation.
H. D. also realized that because women had been deemed a caste, a separate and unequal group, the possibility of individual transformation and transcendence was dependent on the authenticity of cultural identity and symbol. In other words, the emergent self of women could not occur individually; transformation and transcendence was contingent on the creation of a new group identity, a new mythology of womanhood. H. D.'s Goddess symbolizes both what had been happening to women in patriarchal tradition and the potential of women to transcend the paralytic definitions of otherness. Rather than being a supernatural force outside women, the Goddess is a symbolic incarnation of the divine spark in women. H. D. releases the Goddess from her historical enclosure, and her resurrection correlates to the transformation of women:
but she is not shut up in a cave
like a Sybil; she is not
imprisoned in leaden bars
in a coloured window;
she is Psyche, the butterfly,
out of the cocoon. (15 - 20)2
Similar to H. D.'s gradual recovery of her mother via Freudian analysis, the daughter-poet's return to the primal, matriarchal deity is the result of a complex process that begins with immersion in the patriarchal symbols of divinity. The first poem of the trilogy, The Walls Do Not Fall, is a quest for the Christ-image and the divine father who appears as "Osiris" (1).3 In the second poem, Tribute to the Angels, the daughter considers herself a modern John whose revelations transform the fire of death into the Apocryphal fire that must precede the New Jerusalem. "I John saw," H. D. writes, but her vision is a revision of Biblical tradition, a revolutionary epiphany that transforms the Whore of Babylon into the Goddess of Salvation. (1)4 The poet's prayer to the seven masculine angels around God's throne is interrupted by the Goddess' sudden appearance:
I had been thinking of Gabriel,
of the moon-cycle, of the moon shell,
of the moon-crescent
and the moon at full:
I had been thinking of Gabriel,
the moon-regent, the Angel,
and I had intended to recall him
in the sequence of candle and fire
and the law of the seven;
I had not forgotten
his special attribute
of annunciator; I had thought
to address him as I had the others,
Uriel, Annael;
how could I imagine
the Lady herself would come instead?5
But the daughter must first understand how the mother has been defiled by patriarchal traditions:
for suddenly we saw your name
desecrated; knaves and fools
have done you impious wrong,
Venus, for venery stands for impurity
and Venus as desire
is venereous, lascivious (3 - 8)6
The poet is now able to undo the reduction of Venus to carnality and to redeem the Goddess; she commands her to "return, O holiest one, / Venus whose name is kin / to venerate, / venerator" (7 - 10).7 The daughter's purification of the mother-symbol makes the development of mystical revelation easier, and both Freud and H. D. regarded such religious experience as necessary to psychically connect with her own mother. The personal and mythic dimensions of mother and Goddess overlap. Whereas H. D.'s mother appeared in dreams, her Goddess appears in visions. Walking through remnants of the city, the poet passes through a structure and sees a scorched, flowering May apple, an attribute to the Goddess. The tree does not symbolize the fall of man through woman's sin as it does in Genesis; instead, it symbolizes the power of the Goddess to recreate life out of the ashes of death. The source of salvation is not the Son of God but the Lady. The variable refrain of Tribute to the Angels honors the power of the Goddess: "this is the flowering of the rood, / this is the flowering of the wood" (15 - 16).8 She does not appear with the Child. She carries the Book of Life and embodies the mystical forces of Love and Logos in opposition to the contemporaneous Sword.
The Goddess is a revolutionary vision not only as a female savior, but also as a symbolic representation of the transformation accessible to women. Such transformation is connected to the capacity of women to write. The Goddess nearly always functions as a muse. The unconscious, H. D. learned from Freud, is the basis of all non-rational perception and is therefore the fountainhead of both religion and art. "[S]he must have been pleased / with the straggling company of the brush and quill / who did not deny their birthright," the poet says of the Lady. (4 - 6)9 Those born of the mother are simultaneously prophets and artists who interpret the meanings of catastrophes. Although there is no suggestion that her offshoots are all women, Trilogy is a record of H. D.'s obsessions with two men--one as lover, one as poet--and her struggle to find her own way. One can surmise that the Goddess' function as muse is to inspire females to write autonomously and without fear of male mockery.
Trilogy is narrative, philosophical, visionary and discursive, and it belongs to a line that includes Dante Alighieri's La Commedia (The Divine Comedy, translated 1802), William Blake's Milton (1804-11) and Jerusalem (1804-20), and William Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850). Trilogy contemporaneously parallels T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943), Williams' Paterson (1963), and Pound's The Cantos (1972). It technically involves balance: between preparation and improvisation, between fluidity and hesitation, between openness and closure. Structurally there are three long poems, each divided into forty-three cantos. Three is an enchanting number--a referent to La Commedia and the Trinity, among other things. Formally each canto is a single sentence comprising a series of phrases in couplets, excepting the opening canto of The Walls Do Not Fall which consists of triplets. Frequent end-stops--commas, colons, semicolons, exclamation points, and question marks--retain the audience in suspension; a full stop occurs only at the conclusion of a canto. Thus, Trilogy resembles pre-twentieth-century meditative poems, all of which rely on continuous form, and differs from contemporaneous poems which are notable for their disorderly forms. It also differs from H. D.'s earlier work, in which stanzas of a single poem are typically irregular. The predictable form assures the audience from the outset that the microcosm will be coherent and there will be a resolution.
But H. D. balances such regularity with irregular meter and rhyme. The lines are rhythmic, but they are distinctly nonmetrical. Sometimes the lines of a couplet are similar in length; other times the lengths of lines fluctuate from couplet to couplet. With respect to end rhyme, there is no consistent scheme. She creates a web of recurrent sounds via repetition, anaphora, end rhyme (perfect and imperfect), and alliteration (consonance and assonance). Many of her end rhymes are feminine. What the audience encounters is a form that is neither fixed nor free. The following example is from The Flowering of the Rod.
I am Mary, she said, of a tower-town,
or once it must have been towered
for Magdala is a tower;
Magdala stands on the shore;
I am Mary, she said, of Magdala,
I am Mary, a great tower;
through my will and my power,
Mary shall be myrrh;
I am Mary--O, there are Marys a-plenty,
(though I am Mara, bitter) I shall be Mary-myrrh;
I am that myrrh-tree of the gentiles,
the heathen; there are idolaters,
even in Phrygia and Cappadocia,
who kneel before mutilated images
and burn incense to the Mother of Mutilations,
to Attis-Adonis-Tammuz and his mother who was myrrh;
she was a stricken woman,
having borne a son in unhallowed fashion;
she wept bitterly till some heathen god
changed her to a myrrh-tree;
I am Mary, I will weep bitterly,
bitterly ... bitterly.10
The repetition of tower corresponds to the anaphoric "I am Mary." The effects of the incantation are reclamation and transformation of self. After she gains power (Notice tower and power is a perfect rhyme.), she converts from Mary the whore to Mary the savior. The repetition of myrrh reinforces her transformation, and it establishes a connection with similar mothers, which she achieves with the imperfect, feminine end rhyme woman and fashion. The only other couplet with an end rhyme is the final one; the relatively long duration of the e-sound creates tension.
A part of the trilogy's appeal lies in H. D.'s ability to affirm radical spiritual principles without theological argumentation by creating a loose pattern of cadences and sounds that performs the work of persuasion. The sonic texture is a formal correlative of the poem's premise: order, beauty and meaning, though they may be inconspicuous, are present in our shattered world, and the way to recover them is not through rational effort but through psychic states of dream and vision which are prior to the semantic Word as the Word is prior to the Sword. Simply hearing the sounds is like knowing that a deity exists, that paradise exists. That knowledge, which she softly but firmly opposes to the world of rationalism and violence, is to where the daughter-poet leads the audience. For those who already know such, the daughter-poet is reminding them of the spiritual capacities they possess.
Another part of the trilogy's appeal is its tonal lightness, especially when we compare it to pre-twentieth-century meditative poems--John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) and Wordsworth's Prelude, for examples--which are serious, sententious, metrical. And if we compare Trilogy to Eliot's and Pound's contemporaneous poems, the tone is not authoritative but intimate. The short lines and feminine endings do not overwhelm the audience. And the deferment of closure via pauses, repetitions and qualifications corresponds with H. D.'s insistence on a poetics and politics of openness, which she conveys through images and inclusion.
H. D. presents a sequence of generative enclosures: a mollusk that begets a pearl, words that are boxes prepared to hatch butterflies, the poet's heart-shell from which a tree of faith grows, a crucible in which words melt that transforms into a Lady free from a cocoon who is also a scorched yet flowering May apple. In The Flowering of the Rod, a jar of myrrh is Mary, perhaps two Marys, and a speck of light in a headband's jewel blooms into a revelation of paradise. Trilogy is a poem about things which seem closed and finite until they open and are infinite.
Another source of openness is the way the speaker relates to the audience. "An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square:" we are immediately among the initiates to destruction. (1 - 3)11 It is similar to Eliot's gesture of inclusion: "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table; / Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets" (1 - 4)12 The famous opening lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" retain a mysterious resonance partly because the speaker never names the addressee. H. D.'s "you" in the first canto of The Walls Do Not Fall similarly may be the audience, a person in the poem, or a portion of the poet's self. But the "I" in Trilogy sometimes defensively distinguishes itself from others--that is, from skeptics and materialists. Pronouns fluctuate as to imply that the capacity each individual has to be either subject or object, ally or antagonist, singular or plural, definable or indefinable is an essential principle of any spiritual progress.
Her last major work, Helen in Egypt, is a book-length combination of poetry and prose that advances the philosophical and aesthetic themes of Trilogy. Rejecting the traditional masculine focus of such epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey, H. D. concentrates on Helen of Troy and her efforts as an exile in Egypt to confront her past and to create an independent self-identity. The premise of Helen in Egypt is that the poetic vision which resurrects the Goddess also can restore the individual woman to authenticity. Helen's quest involves transformation (purification of hatred) and transcendence (transfiguration into Love). After she is free of shame, Helen explores the three phases of the Goddess (Aphrodite, Thetis, Kore) who simultaneously embody Helen's self, H. D.'s mother, and the Grand Mer, mother of all. The Mother affords the transformation of woman's identity from otherness to authenticity.
H. D. is important both as an imagist poet and as a visionary poet. She not only created distinct images, but also a coherent spiritualism concerning women and men. Although H. D. contributed substantially to the discovery of an archetypal identity for women, she regards men and women as equals in the spiritual realm. They are not seeking the directions of established roles; rather, they are seeking reciprocal insight, reciprocal wisdom.
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1H. D., "Hermes of the Ways," Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January 1913, http://http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/1/4#!/20569688 (16 May 2014).
2H. D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions, 1998) 103.
3Ibid., 25.
4Ibid., 65.
5Ibid., 92.
6Ibid., 74.
7Ibid., 75.
8Ibid., 87.
9Ibid., 100.
10Ibid., 135.
11Ibid., 3.
12T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Selected Poems (San Diego: Harcourt, 1964) 11.
