In my work as a family history missionary, I audit a lot of family histories that have been scanned and digitized. Mostly I’m just looking at images on a monitor to make sure others can read them, and trying to manipulate them to make them more legible. I find not a few poems, and I always stop to read them, and usually they’re execrable. A while back I found this one:
Remember now as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now you soon will be,
Prepare for death and follow me.
The obvious structural parallels with the Lorenzo Snow’s couplet, “As man is, God once was; as God now is, man may be” suggest that this may have been a fairly common sentiment (the instance I found is said to be from the gravestone of one John Piper, who died in 1835[i]). It represents the popular fruition of iambic meter which was, even then, dying — with the rise of Whitman’s long line, and Dickinson’s fractured syntax, as I have noted before. This I find exemplified by two American poets, one employing the more traditional iambic verse, for the most part, Wallace Stevens; and one employing the Whitman/Dickinson new line, Hilda Doolittle. I find myself wondering not who was the better poet, but who was more influential on the next generation — mine — and the current generation of poets.
Their careers couldn’t have started less alike, although both published early in Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry. I want to show the contrast between them with two somewhat longish poems, and a third short poem. “Sunday Morning” about the longest thing Stevens ever wrote; it was published early in his career; “Trilogy” may be the longest for HD, and she published its parts towards end of her career, in 1944, 1945 and 1946. So first, read this work by the lawyer and insurance executive:
Sunday Morning
I
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.
II
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
III
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
IV
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
V
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.
VI
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.
VII
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.[ii]
VIII
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
With almost the leisure of that lady in her peignoir, Stevens examines the death of faith. When this poem was published in Poetry in November 1915, Harriet Monroe asked Stevens to cut it. If you want to see how that worked, read stanzas I, VIII, IV, V & VII in that order, and replace in stanza VII, “seraphim” with “serafin” and in stanza V, “She causes boys to pile new plums and pears / On disregarded plate” with “She causes boys to bring sweet-smelling pears / And plums in ponderous piles” in stanza V above. In other words, apart from some minor changes in punctuation, there is little difference between the earlier version and the later.
The poem appears in Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, published in 1923[iii]; the corrected edition corrects “prophesy” in stanza IV, line 6, to “prophecy.” Otherwise there is no difference between the two versions. I prefer the longer, and I think Stevens is right to shift stanza II in the short version to the last stanza. But in either case, this elegant musing on death as the source of our perception of beauty, and on the death of faith as the source of our hunger for beauty, holds up well.
The contrast between that meditation on beauty, and this depiction of beauty in Doolittle’s poem, may be indicated as much by the difference in punctuation as anything else. Stevens begins every line with a capital letter. H.D. begins only the first line in a stanza, even when a period ends a line in mid-stanza, as in the final stanza of section III.
The Contest
I
Your stature is modelled
with straight tool-edge:
you are chiselled like rocks
that are eaten into by the sea.
With the turn and grasp of your wrist
and the chords’ stretch,
there is a glint like worn brass.
The ridge of your breast is taut,
and under each the shadow is sharp,
and between the clenched muscles
of your slender hips.
From the circle of your cropped hair
there is light,
and about your male torso
and the foot-arch and the straight ankle.
II
You stand rigid and mighty —
granite and the ore in rocks;
a great band clasps your forehead
and its heavy twists of gold.
You are white — a limb of cypress
bent under a weight of snow.
You are splendid,
your arms are fire;
you have entered the hill-straits —
a sea treads upon the hill-slopes.
III
Myrtle is about your head,
you have bent and caught the spray:
each leaf is sharp
against the lift and furrow
of your bound hair.
The narcissus has copied the arch
of your slight breast:
your feet are citron-flowers,
your knees, cut from white-ash,
your thighs are rock-cistus.
Your chin lifts straight
from the hollow of your curved throat.
your shoulders are level —
they have melted rare silver
for their breadth.[iv]
This description of what could be a statue, or what could be a beauty contestant, is offered without any explanation, in stark contrast to “Sunday Morning.” “The Contest” could be between the chiselled beauty of a statue and the elements of natural creations to which it is compared, as well as between the adornments of gold and silver and a living beauty, whether male or female. H.D. does not seem to want us to understand, but rather to see. There is only one difference between the version published in Sea garden in 1916[v] and the version above. Section I, stanza 4, has “torse” in the third line, instead of “torso.” I actually like “torse” better, because of its echo of “torsion,” which could refer to a male-like motion of the model, rather than to a male torso. Given H.D.’s gender ambivalence, that could be deliberate.
I will take that up, along with the difference between the careers of the two poets, in my next post. But I want to close this post with an incident from the life of Stevens, who apparently had no ambivalence regarding his gender. Let me first remind you of R.A. Christmas’s discussion, in Bunk-House Poetics 9, of Stevens and Frost: “Objectively, Wallace Stevens is likely a better / poet than Robert Frost—it’s a close call”. The two men had met, at Casa Marina in Key West, where Frost and his wife went on doctor’s orders. Stevens was on vacation. Their first dinner together ending in a bout of drinking in which Stevens drunk himself under the table. Frost delighted in telling that story, which irritated Stevens.
They met again in 1940, when Frost was again in Key West, and:
they exchanged some teasing remarks. “The trouble with you, Robert, is that you’re too academic,” Stevens remarked. Frost replied that Stevens was, indeed, “too executive.” Then Stevens said, with mock horror: “But you, you write about … subjects.” Frost came back: “And you, Wallace, you write about bric-a-brac.”[vi] In my next post I will examine some of that bric-a-brac; a little further on, I will look at Frost’s subjects, in conjunction with an examination of the work of Sara Teasdale.
But hold on, I hear you say: you’ve flipped entirely away from H.D. and back to Stevens.
Your turn.
[i] History of the descendants of John and Margaret Piper, who lived near Mill Creek, Pa., 125 or more years ago / prepared by Marshall C. Piper. — Milesburg, Pa.: [the author], 1937.
[ii] The collected poems of Wallace Stevens. — Corrected ed. / edited by John N. Serio and Chris Beyers. — New York : Vintage, 2015; pp. 71-75.
[iii] My copy is the “Poetry Reprint Series” hardback from 1975, reprinting Harmonium / by Wallace Stevens. — New York : Knopf, Mcmxxiii, pp. 100-104. It is photographically reproduced from a copy in the British Museum.
[iv] Collected poems. 1912-1944 / H.D. / edited by Louis L. Martz. — New York : New Directions, 1983, pp. 12-14.
[v] My copy is the “Poetry Reprint Series” hardback from 1975, reprinting Sea garden / by H. D. — London : Constable, 1916, photographically reproduced. The poem appears on pp. 10-11.
[vi] Robert Frost : a life / Jay Parini. — New York : Holt, c1999, p. 330. The source for this incident is Lawrence Thompson and R.H. Winnick, The later years, the third volume in a biography Parini calls “a three-volume assault on Frost’s character.”
Featured image by Mark Basarab