the presence—all but unbearably—and yet, at the same time, sheltered it within the presence.
“To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”—this second commandment of Pound’s Imagist manifesto was essential in the high art that lay back of the famous rapture of H.D.’s early work, the root in practice of her lyric genius. The line of her verse grew taut, tempered to keep an edge naked in experience, tense to provide a mode in which reverberations of these presences might be heard. The image and the voice or dramatic mask provided the nexusof a mystery in Poetry corresponding to the outer and inner worlds in which the poetess, now a priestess in the mysteries of the language, worked toward higher and finer modes of participation in a mystery in Life Itself.
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
“To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation”—this second commandment of Pound’s Imagist manifesto was essential in the high art that lay back of the famous rapture of H.D.’s early work, the root in practice of her lyric genius. The line of her verse grew taut, tempered to keep an edge naked in experience, tense to provide a mode in which reverberations of these presences might be heard. The image and the voice or dramatic mask provided the nexusof a mystery in Poetry corresponding to the outer and inner worlds in which the poetess, now a priestess in the mysteries of the language, worked toward higher and finer modes of participation in a mystery in Life Itself.
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
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