The H.D. Book (47 page)

•

Coleridge and Pound alike have a common source in their reading of the Renaissance Hermeticist Marsilio Ficino’s version of Iamblichus’
De Mysteriis.
“In most psychologies employing the concept of spirit, and often in Ficino’s,” D. P. Walker tells us in his
Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella,
“
all
sensation is by means of the spirit, and the media of all sense-data are some kind of spirit,” and he quotes a passage from a letter of Ficino’s that bears upon this matter of the music of poetry and the vision of poetry,
melopoeia
and
phanopoeia,
as a magic to arouse the mind to form and content, of the casting of the image or echo of creation by some affinity of body, soul, and spirit for the manifestation of song:

Nor is this surprising; for, since song and sound arise from the cogitation of the mind, the impetus of the phantasy, and the feeling of the heart, and together with the air they have broken up and tempered, strike the aerial spirit of the hearer, which is the junction of the soul and body, they easily move the phantasy, affect the heart and penetrate into the deep recesses of the mind.

•

Our consciousness or idea of having heart and mind, as well as of having soul and spirit, being aroused by such a poetry.

•

“The impetus of the phantasy,” Walker tells us, “when distinguished from imagination, is a higher faculty, which forms ‘intentions’.” I would recall Pound’s questioning in the Cavalcanti essay: “Does ‘
intenzion
’ mean intention (a matter of will)? does it mean intuition, intuitive perception . . . ?” In working upon his translation of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega,” which was to be reworked in Canto XXXVI, Pound takes care to distinguish between the concept of “
intellect passif,
” which he finds in Renan’s
Averroès et Averroïsme
defined as “la faculté de reçevoir les phantasmata,” and the “
possible intelletto
,” which Pound translates as “latent intellect.”

•

“Form, Gestalt,” Pound notes: “Every spiritual form sets in movement the bodies in which (or among which) it finds itself.” Love starts from form seen and takes His place, as subject not object, as mover, in the idea of the possible.

•

Who will, may hear Sordello’s story told:
His story? Who believes me shall behold
The man, pursue his fortunes to the end . . .

so Robert Browning opens
Sordello,
calling upon will and belief, where the imagination appears as a theatrical magic, a cooperation between the writing and the reading, between the speaker and the hearer, to participate in the reality of a world evoked by words given the magic of belief. “
Appears Verona,
” the Faustian poet directs, and then, again, as if calling up a spirit—“Then, appear, Verona!” Here the beginning of his
Cantos
in its first version:

Hang it all, there can be but the one ‘Sordello,’
But say I want to, say I take your whole bag of tricks. . . .

“Has it a place in music?” he asks. The answer may lie in our passage from Ficino, for later Pound proposes in this first draft of Canto I: “We let Ficino / Start us our progress . . . ”

And your: ‘Appear Verona!’

I walk the airy street,

See the small cobbles flare with poppy spoil.

“Lo, the past is hurled / In twain,” Browning shows us in
Sordello:

        up-thrust, out-staggering on the world,

Subsiding into shape, a darkness rears
Its outline, kindles at the core, appears
Verona.

The evocation is Shakespearean. But this Verona has no stage but a place in the believing mind—a stage belief makes in the mind (as Shakespeare
too has but one place where his world is most real). The scene itself then is a spirit. Both Sordello and Verona are shadows in which the form of the poet itself quickens, setting into motion the body in which it finds itself, the body of a belief.

•

In the same years that Pound worked on
The Spirit of Romance
and “Cavalcanti,” studying Avicenna and Ficino, the London years before the War when he was in the excitement of understudying Yeats, gathering the lore of light and forms that continues to work in
The Cantos
half a century later; in the same years that he attended the Quest lectures of G. R. S. Mead on Simon Magus and Helen of Tyre, on Hierotheos’s
Book of the Hidden Mysteries,
on the
augoeides
and Origen’s “primal paradisiacal body of light as the
seminarium
from which all bodily forms, both subtle and gross, can arise”; in the very years that defined the lifetime of Imagism proper—from the Credo of 1912 to H.D.’s resignation as literary editor of
The Egoist
and her replacement by Eliot in 1917—Pound, as a messenger, angel or Hermes, of Poetry, moved between the generation of Yeats, initiate of the esoteric tradition, and the generation of Gaudier-Brzeska, prophet of the spirit or genius of forms which Gaudier called “sculptural energy” and “the vortex,” and of the little group of fellow poets, “Imagists,” among whom H.D. was central. The “movement” was not an isolated literary affectation or strategic front but the first phase of certain generative ideas in poetry that were to reach their fruition, after the modernism of the twenties and the critical reaction of the thirties (when Pound, Williams, and H.D. were far apart in their work), three decades later in the period of the Second World War with the great poems of Pound’s, Williams’s and H.D.’s old age that begin with H.D.’s War Trilogy, with
The Walls Do Not Fall,
published in 1944.

In turn, the germ-idea of the “image” in its beginning phase was a fruition of a general renaissance of theosophy and psychology in the first decade of the century which, like the Hellenistic and the Florentine renaissances, brought back the matter of old mystery cults, “reawakened” the gods and revived speculations concerning the nature of the imagination. Pound’s “See, they return,” Williams’s “Now—they are coming into bloom again!” from the poem “March,” H.D.’s cry—“O
gold, stray but alive / on the dead ash of our hearth”—from “The Tribute,” these convey the yearning for the revival of the past in the present, the leaven of dormant powers awakened again. Not only poets but intellectuals in the wake of Frazer’s
Golden Bough
and Bergson’s
Evolution Créatrice
were involved. So, we find Dora Marsden, the editor of
The Egoist,
writing on the image as a factor of knowledge:

The animal which thinks must have two worlds to think with . . . intellection is nothing other than the interweaving of two worlds. He must have become so well acquainted with his inner images that, when he cognizes (experiences) the outer image, the inner relative springs into effect alongside it. Precisely the superimposition of the external thing by its wraith-like indwelling double constitutes re-cognition.

Or, again, John Gould Fletcher’s review of H.D.’s
Sea Garden
in 1917, with its reference to “Plotinus, or Dionysius the Areopagite, or Paracelsus, or Behmen, or Swedenborg, or Blake,” may suggest the ambiance of intellectual conversation in which the “image” of Imagism arose.

•

The landscape of
The Pisan Cantos
or of
Paterson,
like the landscape of The War Trilogy, is a multiple image, in which the historical and the personal past, along with the divine world, the world of theosophical and of poetic imagination, may participate in the immediate scene. H.D. had seen this in the 1920s as a palimpsest. In literature, Pound had written, “the real time is independent of the apparent.” So, Henry James mingles with lynxes and with the divine powers Manitou and Kuthera attending, and Mt. Taishan appears in the Pisan atmosphere. From a photo in
National Geographic,
the wives of an African chief come into the landscape of
Paterson,
and a dwarf living under the falls is also the genius of the language. So, in the initial dedication of
The Walls Do Not Fall
(recalling the Rome/London/Egypt sequence of
Palimpsest
in 1926), H.D. proposes an image between two worlds: Egypt 1923 and London 1942, which opens into a reality whose time will take a center in the Nativity.

•

Pound had observed that Dante in the
Commedia
had not only given an account of the soul’s journey (or “trip,” as it is called by the devotees of the psychedelic experience) but had also created an “image” of the divine world: the total presentation of the poem was itself an image. The “idea” of the poem is this concretion of three worlds in one—a unity of real time in which many apparent times participate, a central intention whose meaning appears on many levels, an architecture of reality with its ascending and descending spirits—the whole a vision or seeing of a thing directly treated. The particular images of the poem then are seen to be notes in a melody that is in turn part of a larger movement, and these images belong to movements, in turn forming the “world” of the whole, a single great image. This imagination of the “world” to which the intent of the poem belongs is Coleridge’s “primary imagination,” and for Ficino the phantasy that is informed by the intention of the whole, the Image of images.

•

“Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth canto is finished,” Yeats writes of Pound in 1928, “display a structure like a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes . . . and, mixing with these, medieval or modern historical characters.” Then: “He has shown me upon the wall a photograph of a Cosimo Tura decoration in three compartments, in the upper the Triumph of Love and the Triumph of Chastity, in the middle Zodiacal signs, and in the lower certain events in Cosimo Tura’s day.” The whole, Yeats saw as a prescribed composition, or an architectural plan, having sets, archetypal events, even as he himself was forcing his
Vision
into prescribed wheel and gyre, to get the times right, imposing a diagrammatic order of such archetypes upon history.

“God damn Yeats’ bloody paragraph,” Pound writes in 1939: “Done more to prevent people reading
Cantos
for what is
on the page
than any other one smoke screen.” “HEAR Janequin’s intervals, his melodic conjunctions from the violin solo,” he writes in
Kulchur:
“The
forma,
the immortal
concetto,
the concept, the dynamic form which is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet.” Yeats saw structure like Bach’s; but Pound contrasts the music of structure, “as J. S. Bach
in fugue or keyboard toccata,” with the “music of representative outline,” which he finds in Janequin’s intervals and conjunctions, and which he would seek himself, as “from the floral background in Pisanello’s Este portrait, from the representation of visible things in Pietro di Borgo, there is a change to pattern and arabesque, there is an end to the Mediaeval Anschauung, the mediaeval predisposition.” The poem, like music, taking shape upon the air. In
The Cantos,
Aphrodite appearing to her son Anchises at Cythera takes form upon the air—that is, upon the element, “the air they have broken up and tempered,” and also upon the air or melody the violin plays, having the voices of birds as Pisanello has the pattern of flowers in his art. Pound works to incorporate the voices of men and even, in the Adams Cantos, the epistolary styles as musical entities leading into pattern and arabesque, to bring forward phrasings and syncopations of vowel-tones and consonants. Yet what he had achieved in
The Cantos,
Pound came to feel by the time he was writing
Kulchur,
was not the clear line of Janequin, who had transmuted the sounds of birds into a musical reality, nor the architectural mastery of Bach, but an art—like the music of Beethoven or like Bartók’s Fifth Quartet, Pound says—having “the defects inherent in a record of struggle.” The real time of
The Cantos
was not to be independent of the apparent time.

•

It is the form of the poet’s experience itself that we see in the form of his work; in
The Cantos,
of struggle and conflict as well as of independent and sublime vision, of stubborn predispositions as well as of taking form from the air. “What is a god?” Pound had asked in his “Religio.” “A god is an eternal state of mind,” he had answered. “When is a god manifest? When the states of mind take form.” The
religio
was also a
poetics
in which the imagination was the eternal state of mind, taking form in the things of the poem. But Pound in the twenties and thirties came more and more to depreciate the imagination. Poetic belief, the belief that is volunteered in what is but imagined to be real, contends with the authoritative belief, the belief that is commanded and that must be defended against heresy. Where in the essays of the London period Pound is exploring ideas of imagination and poetry, in the essays of Rapallo he speaks not as a visionary but as pedagogue, a culture
commissar, an economic realist, a political authority, and, in each of these roles, he feels that imagination and vision are unsound. Aesthetics has a ground in reality that inspiration does not: “the Whistler show in 1910 contained more real wisdom than that of Blake’s fanatic designs.” Perhaps he suffered from a blind reaction to Yeats’s values, but
The Cantos
would move Pound again and again to ecstatic imagination beginning with
The Pisan Cantos.
Leucothea would be invoked throwing her girdle to rescue the Odysseus-poet of
The Cantos
from the sea of time and space as Blake shows her in his
The Cycle of Life of Man
[reading Kathleen Raine’s
Blake and Tradition,
1969: R.D.], as the neo-Platonists return to inspire the late Cantos. The chapter “Neo-Platonicks, Etc
.
” in
Kulchur
does not disown, but it dissembles: “This kind of thing from the Phaedrus, or wherever it comes from, undoubtedly excites certain temperaments, or perhaps almost anyone if caught at the right state of adolescence or in certain humours.” Like the exile of Odysseus, Pound’s exile can be read as the initiation of the heroic soul (the hero of a Poetry) descending deep into hubris, offending and disobeying orders of the imagination, and returning at last after trials “home.” Odysseus offends Poseidon and is shipwrecked; Pound offends the Primary Imagination and comes at last to trials of old age and despair.