Self and Community in H.D.'s The Walls Do Not Fall

I've just begun reading H.D.'s long poem "The Walls Do Not Fall," which is the first of three long poems comprising "Trilogy" (1944-1946). The poems are primarily about the Second World War, and more particularly about the experience of being in London during the Blitz. So in many ways, this is a community poem, exploring the spirit of resistance and fortitude of a whole people. H.D. frequently employs the first-person plural to give witness to collective experience. For example, in the first section she writes:

the flesh? it was melted away,
the heart burnt out, dead ember,
tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered,

yet the frame held:
we passed the flame: we wonder
what saved us? what for?

One pictures the people of London sharing meaningful looks as they go through their lives recognizing that they have shared the experience of survival -- and continue to share the experience of danger. H.D. suggests that this sort of experience is more than just life or death; the threat of death can lead to transcendent understanding. Again in the first section, she writes that the "ruin opens / the tomb, the temple." Rather than just a fear of death, she suggests a spiritual possibility; the risk that one might lose one's life opens up meaning beyond the mundane.

This first section introduces the image of ruins, buildings damaged by the falling bombs, but with walls that do not fall. But she sees this as more than destruction. She understands these events as lessons in understanding. The perilous life brings wisdom that exceeds other forms of knowledge:

another sliced wall
where poor utensils show
like rare objects in a museum;

Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,

While I have much of this poem left to read, it seems that H.D. sets up an opportunity to explore different modes of epistemology. That is, she compares immediate experience to research and reflection, and she seems to argue here in favor of immediate experience (or perception). From this perspective, her poetic project seems to be "modern" in the sense that it operates on a different level than Wordsworth's sense of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquillity.

But there is an obvious tension between her valorization of immediacy and the actual poetry in "The Walls Do Not Fall." Her later work is quite different from her earlier Imagistic pieces. This poem is clearly not presenting an "emotional complex in an instant of time."