Trilogy by H. D.

First published:The Walls Do Not Fall, 1944; Tribute to the Angels, 1945; The Flowering of the Rod 1946; collected in Trilogy, 1973

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

Trilogy is a poem in three parts that in the collected edition is slightly more than one hundred pages long. Each of the three parts consists of forty-three poems that are written primarily in unrhymed couplets, though there are occasional stanzas of triplets and single lines. The first part, The Walls Do Not Fall, addresses the need H. D. (Hilda Doolittle used these initials rather than her full name) feels to refashion the old myths of monotheistic patriarchy so that they may come to include myths of female creativity and power. Her sense of this need arises from seeing all around her the devastation of World War II. H. D. situates the possibility of transformation away from the routine of war, at the very level of language itself. She sets out to reveal the hidden power of language to make and unmake the way human beings perceive and experience the world. Her tendency to explore the etymological and poetic possibilities in words accounts for her sometimes unfamiliar and arcane choice of words. The Walls Do Not Fall opens H. D.’s Trilogy in the same way that Dante initiates The Divine Comedy (c. 1320)—with a vision of the Inferno. In both poems, the reader experiences the destruction of human community as a result of a spiritual or imaginative failure. Part 2 of Trilogy, Tribute to the Angels, opens up the possibility of a new version of Revelation. H. D. requires that the pagan, typically feminine, figures of fertility and generation that Judeo-Christian civilization erased be restored. The transformation, so fully detailed in part 1, begins to take place. Tribute to the Angels corresponds to Dante’s Purgatory. Here H. D. presents the possibility of purification in an alchemical fire. The final part of the poem, The Flowering of the Rod, pays tribute to the power of the suffering and pain of war to transform bellicose, masculinized mythologies of the past into the benign and generative possibilities of the procreative and peaceful feminine. It corresponds to Dante’s Paradise (c. 1320).

The title of the first part, The Walls Do Not Fall, refers to the threat against London posed by the German air raids in 1942. The walls of the city were literally at risk, and H. D., who voluntarily spent the war years in London, links the modern city to many ancient cities that were menaced by war. “There, as here,” she writes, “ruin opens/ the tomb, the temple; enter/ there as here, there are no doors.” The bomb blast tears off the roof of the tomb or the temple. Yes, there is destruction, but at the same time, there is an opening (where there had been a roof), a place where something new enters and the walls do not fall down.

H. D. believes (partly, at least, as a result of her analysis by Freud) that the history of the race is reproduced in the history of the individual, and that the past is contained in an abbreviated and condensed form in the present. “Here,” in this case, is London; “there” is Karnak, Troy, or Luxor. While the immediate place of danger is paralleled by other, distant cities, there is a parallel in time as well as space. The events of the past, especially the events that have to do with the creation of consciousness, continue to exist and act in the present.

In the second part of Trilogy, Tribute to the Angels, H. D. initiates the process of linking the cosmology of the Judeo-Christian tradition with the suppressed fertility goddesses of earlier polytheistic cultures. The poet adds Hermes Trismegistus to the familiar Old and New Testament angels who are the messengers of God. By introducing Hermes, H. D. makes available to her reader both the alchemical power that transforms base material into gold (Hermes is the god of alchemy) and the power of interpretation that sanctions H. D.’s revision of Western mythological thought (Hermes also presides over the specialized science of interpretation that was named for him: hermeneutics). His mythic power gives H. D. permission to “take what the old-church/ found in Mithra’s tomb,/ candle and script and bell,/ take what the new-church spat upon/ and broke and shattered.” The model of transformation requires that one take the broken ruins of modern culture “and of your fire and breath,/ melt down and integrate/ re-invoke, re-create/ opal, onyx, obsidian,/ now scattered in the shards/ men tread upon.”

The third and last section, The Flowering of the Rod, is an enactment of the feminization of the historical and traditional masculine mythologies. In this section, H. D. refashions the story of the Nativity from the New Testament; she links Mary of Nazareth with Mary Magdalene. The linking of the Madonna with the harlot is a way of restoring the Scarlet Whore of Babylon—who, H. D. believes, was actually the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis—to the central creative act of Christianity. The birth of Christ is described as the “word made flesh,” so by implicating Mary Magdalene with that primal act, H. D. is able to introduce a powerful feminine mythic presence at the point of the making of language. Having moved from modern London in The Walls Do Not Fall to a medieval city in Tribute to the Angels, H. D. concludes The Flowering of the Rod in the desert of ancient Israel. In the cradle of civilization in the Near East, where the Christ as child finds himself made flesh, H. D. finds her new beginning in the emblematic gift of the magi: “Kaspar [one of the magi, who figures significantly in the final section of Trilogy] knew the seal of the jar was unbroken/ he did not know whether she knew/ the fragrance came from the bundle of myrrh/ she held in her arms.”

Forms and Devices

Like the great medieval poem that Trilogy resembles, The Divine Comedy, H. D.’s meditation on the spiritual and cultural consequences of World War II is imaginatively based on a cosmological vision of analogy. H. D. shares with Dante (and with many more recent and more skeptical thinkers, such as Freud) a view of the world and history as a totality made up of nesting correspondences and interconnections, and a sense that no cultural or spiritual imagining is ever really lost. The potentiality of the past is not only still present but also can be restored or caused to be reborn.

H. D. affirms the interconnectedness of the things in the world by means of what she calls the “palimpsest.” A palimpsest is a manuscript or paper on which writing has been totally or partially erased to make space for new writing. It is important for H. D., however, that the old writing is still present as a trace or a suggestion and remains to somehow color one’s reading of the new text. A simple example of the palimpsest is the “sword,” a weapon or means of destruction that contains within it the “word,” which for H. D. is infinitely redemptive. While it is erased by and enclosed within the sword, the “word” is always there, waiting to be reread by the poet. To achieve this rereading, the poet must “search the old highways/ for the true-runes, the right-spell,/ recover old values.”

In her search along the “old highways,” H. D. finds “Isis, Asete or Astarte.” These are Semitic or Egyptian goddesses of fertility and reproduction who have been diminished by the prevailing monotheism to harlots, deprived of their force and charisma. The trace or palimpsest remains, however, and the goddesses have the power to reassert their power. Those who consign them to the “flesh pots” are speaking, H. D. declares, in the rhythm of “the devils hymn.”

Those who have designed the spiritual world in which everyone must live and fight wars write within a destructive context: “your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate, how can you scratch out/ indelible ink of the palimpsest/ of past misadventure?” The “devil’s hymn” is not itself the final word against the poet, however: “But we fight for life, we fight, they say, for breath.” What good are the poet’s writings? They can be taken “with us/ beyond death.” H. D. calls for a recognition of the fundamental source of language: “Mercury, Hermes, Thoth/ invented the script, letters, palette.” The source of language, not only spoken language, but also all the means by which human thought and feeling are inscribed upon the world, is far more complex and diverse than the modern world thinks. The plural divinities to whom H. D. looks are far more powerful than had been realized. “The indicated flute or lyre-notes/ on papyrus or parchment/ are magic, indelibly stamped/ on the atmosphere somewhere,/ forever.” Here H. D. returns to her “sword”/“word” palimpsest: “remember O Sword,/ you are the younger brother, the latter-born,/ your Triumph, however exultant/ must one day be over.” In the next verse, she indicates by using italics that the erased writing in sword is not merely language or language in general; rather, it is the act of incarnation that begins the Christian era: “in the beginning/ was the Word.”

Another example of H. D.’s ability to reread—and hence to transform—the language by probing within everyday, feeble, constricted language for something more potent occurs at the end of The Walls Do Not Fall. In this final stanza of the section in italics, the poet returns to the walls of the city: “Still the walls do not fall,/ I do not know why;/ there is zrr-hiss, lightening in a not-known,/ unregistered dimension; we are powerless.”

This despair must be read against her earlier declaration, “I profit by every calamity.” What profit could possible accrue from such calamity? “The floor sags/ like a ship floundering;/ we know no rule of procedure, we are voyagers, discoverers/ of the not-known,/ the unrecorded.” The palimpsest is the ideal vehicle for H. D., who sees herself as one of the “voyagers.” The profit that comes to H. D. in this calamity is the poem, the language itself. She concludes with thoughts that serve to exemplify the possibility that there can be a cracking open to rebirth and restoration that even the most terrible disaster can entail: “possibly we will reach haven,/ heaven.”

Bibliography

Chisholm, Dianne. H. D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Examines H. D.’s later poetry, of which Trilogy is the centerpiece, in the light of her relationship with Freud. Requires some knowledge of standard Freudian terminology. Extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index are provided.

Dickie, Margaret. “Women Poets and the Emergence of Modernism.” In The Columbia History of American Poetry, edited by Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. A sensitive essay that covers H. D., Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Dickie argues that all three women were almost a century ahead of their overshadowing male contemporaries—and thus required that much time to find their audience.

Guest, Barbara. Herself Defined: The Poet H. D. and Her World. London: Collins, 1985. A biography of H. D. which analyzes the complex life of a woman whose work was always autobiographical but which contained symbolic and mythic themes. A bibliography and an index are included.

H. D. Tribute to Freud. Boston: D. R. Godine, 1974. H. D.’s own account of her psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, which provides an entrance into the understanding of her life and mode of work. Crucial to understanding of Trilogy and the works that were to follow. Widely recommended as the first of H. D.’s books to read. With an appendix of letters from Freud to H. D.

Robinson, Janice. H. D.: The Life and Work of an American Poet. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982. An excellent, introspective biography of H. D. Notes, a bibliography, and an index are provided.