The H.D. Book (8 page)

The new poetry was not to be a commodity, a negotiable sensibility in literature or culture, but an instrument in a process of spirit. Pound in his Cavalcanti essay during this early period of Imagism describes such a spiritual process in the contribution of Provence to poetry:

The whole break of Provence with this world . . . is the dogma that there is some proportion between the fine thing held in the mind, and the inferior thing ready for instant consumption. . . . You deal with an interactive force: the
virtu
in short. . . . The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence pervades.

We find in H.D.’s early work the evocation not only of presences of Nature but of the poet’s own nature, her temper or virtu. In the poem “Toward the Piraeus” she pictures her own poetic virtu, contrasting her power with that of another who may have been—for this is one of her Lawrencian poems—D. H. Lawrence:

my own lesser, yet still somewhat fine-wrought,
fiery-tempered, delicate, over-passionate steel.

It is an image of an instrument prepared for experience that is at once the image of her physical body, her spirit, and the temperament of the verse itself. It was an image too of tension in passion that appealed to the sentiments of the modernist generation. Not the erotic sensualities of the poem “Hymen” or the intoxications of “Heliodora” came to stand for H.D.’s special quality as a poet among her admirers, but the tenseness itself, the almost frigid apprehension of the passionate that in the poem “Wash of Cold River” she had characterized as most hers, was taken as her primary attribute:

all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

We might read “carve” for “mould,” for the fiery tempered steel of the poet’s self-projection is the steel of the sculptor’s chisel, shaping the resistant stone. The art that H.D. projects is haunted by Gaudier-Brzeska’s messianic doctrines of sculptural energy and sculptural feeling that swept Pound up into his Vorticist period. Gaudier-Brzeska sought the expression of challenge and intensity that found modelling insipid. “He cut stone until its edge was like metal,” Pound tells us in his work on Gaudier: “The softness of castings displeased him and so he cut the brass direct.”

The matter is of marble, not of clay:

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.

So H.D. concludes “Wash of Cold River.” Her art, and her sense of the passionate, demanded fineness of feeling, exactness, that was not soft or compliant but hard and resistant. She suggested in poems like “Sea Rose,” “Sea Lily,” “Sea Violet,” or “Pear Tree,” an exquisite sensibility, leaf and petal delicately cut, “precious,” “like flint / on a bright stone,” “fragile as agate,” “from such a rare silver,” at once “precious,” “fragile,” “rare,” the bane of critics-to-be, and yet to be shaped only by elemental energies, by sea and wind, furrowed “with hard edge.”

Pound, too, in his Cavalcanti essay refers to the stone and the stone-cutter’s art in order to illuminate the poet’s art:

The god is inside the stone,
vacuos exercet aera morsus
. The force is arrested, but there is never any question about its latency, about the force being the essential and the rest ‘accidental’ in the philosophical technical sense. The shape occurs.

It is along these lines that, in “Pygmalion” (published early in 1917), H.D. presents the poet as the sculptor questioning the vitalities at work in his art beyond the mastery of the craft:

am I master of this
swirl upon swirl of light?

In the magic of the stone’s being carved, the Divine and the human meet; the force of the work is interactive. That demonically inspired restless spirit of the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska haunted not only Pound but H.D., for, in the few years before his fateful death in the First World War, charged with the vision of a vortex of energies to be released in matter toward form in which the drive of his own genius might be consummated, he had had evenings too with the Aldingtons, talking on and on to pour out the message of his Vortex. Possessed by his spirit, or married to his spirit, the sculptor in H.D.’s poem works in stone and light, even as the poet works in the densities of the given meanings of words and in the aura of a gathering music, a breath informing the poem, until an image emerges in the work, working the medium until the work itself is immediate to the mind. But this “work” is both a power and, the artist begins to realize, a person. The work of art is itself a living presence in which its creator stands. Man, stone, and light, cooperate in the event. “Am I the god?” Pygmalion asks:

or does this fire carve me
for its use?

Just as there are certain events in actual life that are so charged with the information of a content that is to be realized in the maturation of the soul or form of the total lifetime, and as there are certain dreams that flood our active consciousness with the forms of unconscious, as yet unborn, facts of our identity, so, for the poet, there are poems that are prophetic of a poetry that is to be realized only in the fullness of the poet’s life, as for H.D. this early poem stands as a foreknowledge, a foreacknowledgment, of the major task she is to undertake in poetry.
Ion,
her version of Euripides’ drama, twenty years later, will mark the re-entry of the forces that for a moment she had seen at work toward fulfillment beyond the psyche in the advent of creative form in “Pygmalion”—of light, of heat, of fire, of stone and god. In the poetry of H.D.’s major phase, particularly in
Helen in Egypt,
the sense increases that as the artist works to achieve form he finds himself the creature of the form he thought at first to achieve. The role of the poet, his craft, is to seek out the design in the carpet, to come to know and then to
acknowledge his identity in the terms of a poetry he but belongs to. The fire is indeed to carve the poet for its use.

•

As we come into the fullness of our sense of a life work, it is as if we were recovering or rescuing the import of what had always been there. We make good our earliest readings, make real what even we failed to see present at the time, transforming the events of our earlier life in a process of realizing what our work and life comes to mean. Creating meaning we create work and life, and, in turn, for meaning is the matter of the increment of human experience which we come to recognize in the language, we unite our individuality with a vision of its communal identity.

Over thirty years, my sense of that first reading of “Heat” has grown along lines of recognition and discovery of affinities to inform my return to those lines. Unconscious of the content that made for that imprint and awakened in me the sense of a self-revelation or life-revelation in the pursuit of Poetry, I was conscious only of my excitement in the inspiration—the new breath in language—and of a vocation. Whatever my abilities, it was here that I had been called to work. Beyond that, I had no more information than the uninformed account of what Imagism was as it was taught in literature classes of the late nineteen-thirties, where I came to learn that Amy Lowell’s “Patterns,” Pound’s “Metro,” Flint’s “Swan,” Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” and this poem “Heat” of H.D.’s were examples of Imagism. Their titles come in a list as if learned by rote. They had become set in the textbooks and classrooms of the late nineteen-thirties from the anthologies and arguments of the Imagist period itself. In the literary establishment Eliot had won the day—he had, indeed, designed that literary establishment in his essays; and H.D., along with Lawrence and even Pound (for Eliot had dismissed from serious consideration the “Religio” and the later Confucian conversion), belonged with those who had departed from what reasonable men consider of concern and had lusted after strange gods. Eliot had the charge of bringing his own poetic imagination into the circumscription of a Christian orthodoxy; but even in literary ranks where Eliot’s own god was considered strange,
Imagism was dismissed as if it were a false religion. The Imagist fallacy was not an inherent weakness but a danger. In textbooks on poetry, the schoolmasters of the rationalist orthodoxy strove to establish Imagism as an aberration, a kind of insanity of the poem, in which imagery, which properly was a means in the poet’s presentation of his picture, became an end, as if image carried a meaning in itself.

There is a crucial difference between the doctrine of the Image where Poetry itself is taken to be a primary ground of experience and meaning in life, and the image which is taken as a fashion in the literary world. With H.D.’s “Heat” or with Joyce’s “I hear an army charging upon the land,” I cannot separate the poem from its operation as prophecy or prayer in the shaping of my own life, the efficacy of the poem to awaken depths in me. The key lies in a rhetoric which is magic in its intent and not literary. This is its heresy.

Pound had presented his Imagist manifesto as an attack on rhetoric. He had sought a cure of tongues in the discipline of the eye, some restraint that would keep words grounded in meaning. The pomp of Milton or the sensual indulgences of Swinburne had led men to take effect and enthusiasm as in themselves poetic—the more effect, the more enthusiasm, the more poetic. There had been an inflation of language. Protesting against the “prolix” and “verbose,” against words “shoveled in to fill a metric pattern or to complete the noise of a rhyme-sound,” against “decorative vocabulary,” Pound’s insistence that there be “absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” was the expression in poetics not only of a modern aesthetic demand for the functional but also of a demand that was moral and economic. If we think of Pound’s later concern for a monetary credit that is grounded in an actual productive order, “the growing grass that can nourish the living sheep,” and his outrage at the great swindling of confidence represented by usury, commodity speculation, money changing, and inflation, we find a basic concern for the good credit of things. Both words and money are currencies that must be grounded in the substance of a credibility if they be virtuous. Abstraction from the actual guarantee of experience meant manipulation of the public trust, as, in the United States, demagogues had long established by their misuses of language the common sense that what was “rhetorical” was for effect only, a
persuading with words that were not truly meant, empty or worse, a hiding of the real meaning in order to make a sell.

In
Guide to Kulchur,
in 1938, relating his own Cantos to the quartets of Bartók, Pound saw in these works “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.”
The Cantos,
designed, as we see them, to bear the imprint of Pound’s experience of man’s history, contain as their condition and express the troubled spirit of our times as no other work in poetry does. It is his impersonating genius that, even where he presents flashes of eternal mind—
veritas, claritas, hilaritas
—they do not appear as a sublimation of the poem but remain involved, by defect, in the agony of the contemporary. A profound creative urge—“So-shu also, / using the long moon for a churn-stick”—churns in the sea of Pound’s spirit everywhere, even as it churns in the sea of our own history. We have our moment of truth just where contention will not allow our reason to rest undisturbed. The figure we seek is revealed in fragments in the path of a moon that troubles the waters in which the path of its light is reflected. It is part of the polemics of his time that is also ours that Pound juxtaposes his insight of the good and his prejudice of the bad. We are lost if we take his uses as having an authority other than the truth of how the world is felt and seen by the poet if he keep alive in him the defects inherent in a record of struggle. We, as readers, must enter the struggle and contend with the drama of defects. When Pound writes “Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation as compared with Milton’s rhetoric,” all is not
claritas.
In the contention, our sense of the good of definiteness and of Dante is to be the greater; but he means also that our sense of the good of rhetoric and of Milton is to be the less. Where Pound uses the popular pejorative demeaning of the word “rhetoric,” voiding its base in the likeness between the flow of speech and the flow of a river, he troubles the currents of meaning. Working with the debased currency of the word, he forces us to search out for ourselves the good credit of the word in man’s experience.

Hretor
(
τωρ, orator) comes from the Greek verb
hreo
(
ω, to say) that had, if not a root in the strict etymological sense, the association of a pun, in common with the verb
hreo
(
ω, to flow). The flow of speech was for the Greeks, as for us, an expression that could refer to words running glibly off the tongue being like a babbling brook, and likewise
to the elemental power of fluency in saying. The poet must be fluent in speech. There must be currents of meaning as well as particularities of meaning. Speech was a river. The Greek lexicon of Liddell & Scott tells us that “
hoi hreontes
was a nickname for the Heraclitean philosophers who held that all things were in a constant state of flux.” The mistrust that men had of speech was their mistrust of rivers that swept men along, that persuaded.