H.D. and boundaries

The first thing I notice in reading H.D.'s 1916 collection "Sea Garden" is the intense thematic interest in borders or boundaries. Many of the objects and actions in the poems take place along the coast. The poems explore the drama of spaces in which two distinct environments come into contact. It's tempting to read a self vs. other conflict into this interest in boundaries, but the poems do not consistently figure either sea or land as the alien environment. The drama is structured in terms of difference, but also in terms of power. There are many images of power and destruction.

In "Sea Lily," for instance, existing at the boundary with the sea involves being "slashed and torn," "shattered," and "dashed." But through it all, the flower is "lifted up." There's an ambivalent relationship with this harsh environment. In the second stanza of "Sea Lily," "Myrtle-bark / is flecked from you." This suggests disintegration of the self; the wind off the sea tears one apart. However, the third and final stanza points out that the flower persists. Elsewhere, H.D. suggests that the harsh environment plays a valuable role in shaping a stronger being. In "Sheltered Garden," she writes of the inland garden:

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks (40-44)

Her series of poems describing sea flowers complicates simple flowers by extracting the sea element from the land element. In other words, she sees the depth of the objects that must survive difficulty and difference. This is one of the reasons it's unsatisfactory to read H.D. as simply an Imagist who attempts to obtain the object. She doesn't seem interested in objectivity in a scientific sense; she isn't an essentialist; she cannot gesture toward the sort of purity needed to claim knowledge of an object.

Instead, H.D charts the necessities of transformation, even those unto death. In another example of boundaries, "Evening" describes the passing of light from the world, the movement of shadows as the sun goes down: "The light passes / from ridge to ridge, / from flower to flower" (1-3). But rather than just the disappearance of light, the poem traces the desires of shadow:

black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow (14-17)

Though the reader may read this as a tragedy in nature, H.D. insists on pursuing the flow of desire in this transformation. Evening, from this perspective, is marked by growth rather than a condensation. Her poem "Night" may be read as a companion piece in which night desires the flower petals: "O night, / you take the petals / of the roses in your hand" (15-17). While this may appear to the reader as a loss, the night has its harsh but productive role to play.

It is significant that H.D. doesn't provide a "Morning" poem to balance this darkness, such a poem would diminish the effect of H.D.'s lesson. Though there remains the unwritten phantom of the following day which surely must follow night, H.D. seems to suggest that beauty is most potential in endings. Even the most disturbing poem, "Cities," describes the graceless city and its crowded inhabitants in a dead, but strangely positive, metaphor: "The city is peopled / with spirits, not ghosts, O my love" (78-79). It is fitting that this poem ends a collection published during the Great War, when the threat of a dead civilization forces that civilization to find the spirit of living in its most airless and deadly places.