Chapter III

To pass from the poetry of Mr. Aldington to the poetry of H. D. is to pass into another world. For H. D. not only is a modern poet, she is in the best sense of the word a primitive poet. She deals with Greek themes in the same way as the Greeks of the seventh century B. C. might have dealt with them. She is not like Mr. Aldington, a sceptic enamoured of their lost beauty. In a sense she is indifferent to beauty. Something speaks to her in every rock, wave, or pine tree of those sunlit landscapes in which she seems to live. For her the decadence of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern world seem never to have existed. She is purely and frankly pagan.

How is it that so many people interested in Imagism seem never to have grasped this essential distinction between her work and Mr. Aldington’s? I must suppose it is because very few people have ever tried to analyze and rank the Imagist poets on any other basis than that of form. But as I have already pointed out, the form of the Imagists is, after all, a matter of lesser importance than the spirit, with which they approach that form. Aldington writes about life: H. D. is almost completely a nature poet. Nature to her is not mere inanimate scenery or beautiful decoration: it is packed with a life and significance which is beyond our individual lives, and all her poems are in a sense acts of worship towards it. Civilization for her does not exist, in our modern sense: she seeks a civilization based only on the complete realization of natural and physical law, without any ethical problems except the need of merging and compounding all one’s desires and emotions in that law. Her poetry is like a series of hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion.

I like to think that this primitive quality in H. D.’s poetry comes from the fact that she is an American. There can be no doubt that we are an uncultivated, a barbarous people. Our ancestors, by migrating to an immense and utterly undeveloped continent, without traditions, were thrown face to face with nature and lost, in consequence, nearly all feeling for their previous culture. If you take a child of civilized parents and bring him up among savages, he will revert to savagery, and in the same way our forefathers, as soon as they ceased to cling to the Atlantic seaboard, changed, through contact with the immense wilderness of the interior, not only mentally but physically. For example, Washington was physically and mentally an English squire of his period: Lincoln, about a hundred years later, was, in appearance and habits of thought, like a man of another race. The Indian, although conquered, gave to his conquerors the Indian way of thinking; or rather the Indian’s surroundings—the endless forest—produced in the newcomers’ minds something of the same way of thinking as the Indian had before their coming. What a pity it has been for art that we, as a nation, did not admit without shame this return to nature! But instead, we were ashamed of our barbarism, and we have striven and are still striving to outdo Europe on its own grounds, with the result that so much of our art seems merely transplanted, exotic, and false. We might have been the Russians of the western hemisphere; instead of that we were almost the provincial English. Instead of Fenimore Cooper and _The Song of Hiawatha_, we might have given to the world a new national epic. But the opportunity is now lost and whatever fragments of that epic may be written will have to be very sophisticated and in a sense artificial products.

To make an end of this long digression, I can truly say that I find nothing transplanted in H. D.’s poetry. She has borrowed a few names of gods from the early Greek, but that was because she found herself in complete sympathy with this people, who, if we are to believe the modern school of archaeology, were quite as barbarian themselves in the Homeric period as the Red Indians, and who lived in the closest contact with nature. Let us take an early example:

Hermes of the Ways

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!

This is only one-half of the poem, but it will serve to show this poet’s method. Here Hermes is identified with the yellow barrier of sand dunes which breaks the wind, and splits it into three directions, as it comes in from the sea. The scenery and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has pointed out, the whole poem might have been called “The Coast of New Jersey.” But just as Coleridge found a way to give a feeling of the emptiness of the sea by narrating the tale of a legendary voyage on it, so H. D. has given us the eternal quality of the New Jersey coast by identifying its savagery with Greek myth.

The difference between H. D.’s poetry and Aldington’s is therefore a difference between an apparent complexity which cannot be analysed, since it is really the simplest synthesis of primitive feeling, and a studied simplicity which on analysis, reveals itself as something very complex and modern. Aldington’s work when studied carefully, raises questions about our life: H. D. goes deeper and offers us an eternal answer. With the single exception of the _Choricos_, I know of no work of H. D.’s which is not superior to Aldington’s in rhythm, as I know of no work of Aldington’s which does not seem to have more unsolved problems underlying its thought. Aldington is monodic, H. D. is strophaic: Aldington writes on many themes: H. D. on two or three: H. D.’s art is more perfect within its limits; Aldington’s is more interesting because of its very human imperfection.

There is another short thing of H. D.’s which fulfils perfectly the Greek dictum that a picture is a silent poem, a poem a speaking picture:

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines,
over our rocks.
Hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.

A chorus of Oreads might very well have sung that to the wind. Over and over again, H. D. never tires of giving us the sea, the rocks, the pines, the sunlight. There is such a hard brightness of sunlight in some of the poems that it makes us fairly dizzy with its intensity:

O wind,
rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it sideways.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air:
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat,
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

These poems are like cries to unknown gods. Some are simply stark in their dramatic magnificence:

The Wind Sleepers

Whiter
than the crust
left by the tide,
we are stung by the hurled sand
and the broken shells.
We no longer sleep,
sleep in the wind,
we awoke and fled
through the Peiraeic gate.

Tear,
tear us an altar,
tug at the cliff-boulders,
pile them with the rough stones.
We no longer
sleep in the wind.
Propitiate us.

Chant in a wail
that never halts;
pace a circle and pay tribute
with a song.

When the roar of a dropped wave
breaks into it,
pour meted words
of sea-hawks and gulls
and sea-birds that cry
discords.

Recently H. D. has been giving us longer and more complex poems—condensed dramas of nature and life. Her style has become broader and deeper, and her thought more weighty. I wish I could quote all of a poem of this nature called _Sea-Gods_. I can only give a brief analysis of it.

The entire poem is a sort of invocation and service of propitiation to the powers of the sea. In its opening lines the poet cries out:

They say there is no hope—
sand—drift—rocks—rubble of the sea,
the broken hulk of a ship,
hung with shreds of rope,
pallid under the cracked pitch.

They say there is no hope
to conjure you.

In short, the gods are merely broken wrecks of the past. The forces of nature cannot help us, it is useless to cry out to them, for they are

—cut, torn, mangled,
torn by the stress and beat,
no stronger than the strips of sand
along your ragged beach.

But, says the poet, in a beautiful passage:

But we bring violets,
great masses, single, sweet:
wood-violets, stream-violets,
violets from a wet marsh,
violets in clumps from the hills.

Every kind of violet is brought and strewn on the sea. For what reason? Here is the answer:

You will yet come,
you will yet haunt men in ships—
you will thunder along the cliff,
break—retreat—get fresh strength—
gather and pour weight upon the beach.

You will bring myrrh-bark,
and drift laurel wood from hot coasts;
when you hurl, high—high—
We will answer with a shout.

For you will come,
you will answer our taut hearts,
you will break the lie of men’s thoughts,
and shelter us for our trust.

Has the sea, then, in this poem been used in some way as a symbol of the eternal drift, change and reflux of our life which we have tried to conceal under theories of ethics, of progress, of immortality, of civilization? Perhaps it has. And the violets—what, then, are they but simply the recollections of our earlier sea-state, of our endless, unconscious drift with the tides of life?

I do not propose here to examine H. D.’s mystic philosophy. That philosophy cannot be disengaged from its context. But from a quite recent poem of hers—a poem very beautiful and baffling, I may perhaps be permitted to quote these few lines, wrenched from their context, without comment:

Sleepless nights,
I remember the initiates,
their gesture, their calm glance,
I have heard how, in rapt thought,
in vision they speak
with another race
More beautiful, more intense than this—

I reason:
another life holds what this lacks:
a sea, unmoving, quiet,
not forcing our strength
to rise to it, beat on beat,
a hill not set with black violets,
but stones, stones, bare rocks,
dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty,
to distract—to crowd
madness upon madness.

Only a still place,
and perhaps some outer horror,
some hideousness to stamp beauty—
on our hearts.