The Living Dead in Section Two of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

In section two of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. sets up a stark contrast between good and evil: "Evil was active in the land, / Good was impoverished and sad."  The setting, described in the first section, is still WWII, and more specifically the bombing of London.  So the reader is encouraged to see the references to good and evil as specific historical references to the Allies and Axis powers.  However, H.D. is not concerned with historical explication.  Instead, she moves from the large-scale historical forces toward an investigation of the poet's responsibilities:

your rhythm is the devil's hymn,

your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
how can you scratch out

indelible ink of the palimpsest
of past misadventure?

In a way, this is the question the poem as a whole tries to answer: how can one break the pleasant inertia of stillness and begin creating?  As many H.D. scholars have pointed out, Trilogy is not just a reaction to the difficulties of war; it is also an examination of creativity.  H.D. had experienced a long period of creative difficulty leading up to the writing of Trilogy (though she wrote several novels in the period that unpublished in her lifetime).  What she could do with her "stylus" was an anxious question for her at the time.  And it seems important that she was able to unleash her creative powers within the context of good and evil.

Underneath this surface reading, however, we are forced to ask about her characterizations of good and evil.  That is, how can good be so ill-equipped to care for itself?  She points out that good was "smug and fat."  Good requires some intensive rejuvenation.  In short, good is not good on its own.  It needs an active force to keep it going.

For me, as a psychoanalytic critic, this means we must seek the drive and the repression at work in this dynamic situation.  Without being able (at this point) to provide a reading of Trilogy in its entirety, I must read this second section against the first, in which the speaker confronts a destructive war.  Therefore, it seems that physical danger itself is the motivating force.  The possibility that death may seek out the speaker from the sky, unknown and unbidden, is what drives the creative efflorescence H.D. experiences.

While this, by itself, seems fairly obvious, there are a few directions we can take this.  First, death should be viewed primarily as the imposition of finality.  I argue that human motivation, which includes poetic creation, is based on strategies to deny or delay finality.  I use this term rather than "death" because finality is conceptual while death is too frequently reserved for the physical.  Images of movement, continuation, activity, or struggle counteract finality; it sounds far-fetched to say that they counteract death.

The second way to read this section of the poem is to think of the productive (though oxy-moronic) concept of the living dead.  For that is what H.D. gives us in her depiction of the "good": impoverished, sad, smug, fat.  They are alive but they are not truly living.  It is as if they have ground to a halt, and it is the terror from the sky that causes them to spring to life -- and causes H.D. to begin her creative endeavors again.

Worms of Death and Life in Section Six of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

In section six of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. employs the worm as a symbol for human persistence: "In me (the worm) clearly / is no righteous, but this- // persistence." The section takes on a narrative flow as it describes the life of a worm; it escapes predators, explores a leaf, and eats leaf and wheat. H.D. shows the reader this tiny drama, which is used to advance significant claims about the power of poetry and reflection in the face of human activity.

First, she conveys the worm's insult to the reader (or at least human beings in general); the worm points out our inability to understand such miniscule affairs:

unintimidated by multiplicity
of magnified beauty,

such as your gorgon-great
dull eye can not focus

nor compass

Humans have "gorgon-great" and "dull" eyes that cannot comprehend the minutiae of the worm's world. H.D. offers a challenge to the reader's perspective. This is an example of Sarah H. S. Graham's argument that H.D. "is at war with her audience" (found in the journal Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44.2). Graham's point, however, isn't merely to suggest that H.D. is antogonistic, but that she argues with the human self.

In this way, H.D. seeks other perspectives from which to consider the potential for human understanding. The comparison of small and large in this section allows H.D. to question the epistemological tools at our disposal. The vividness of this section and the fact that the poet can assume the worm's viewpoint suggests that we can overcome the challenge of our size in order to understand things outside the usual scope of our perspective. In other words, the evidence provided by this section and the poem as a whole reveals our capacity for understanding.

Significantly, however, it is also evident that this sort of success is only possible through poetry. Metaphor, as a poetic and linguistic manuever of the mind, opens up the possibility for this type of seeing. The importance of poetry and language as a record of human experience and capability is emphasized throughout the poem (for example in sections 8-11).

The intruiging move in this section is H.D.'s transition from outward action and inward revelation. The section ends with an end to the worm's adventures:

I am yet unrepentant,

for I know how the Lord God
is about to manifest, when I,

the industrious worm,
spin my own shroud.

The shroud usually indicates death, of course, but the juxtaposition of industriousness (and escape and exploration) throughout the section is chillingly terminated by the specter of death and stillness indicated by the shroud. How does one read the repeated emphasis on persistence in light of this ending? First, we must remember that a "shroud" for a worm might indicate a cocoon created during the pupa stage of an insect. That is, the shroud might indicate transformation more than death. Second, the image of a cocoon is useful in looking at the succeeding sections of the poem in which H.D. contemplates contemplation. She considers how one shuts one's self off from human experience in order to formulate and express the meaning of that experience. I hope to follow her investigations (and post on them) as I read the rest of the poem.

Subjectivity in Section Four of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

H.D. seems to advance a notion of subjectivity worth examining in section four of "The Walls Do Not Fall." She uses an extended metaphor in which coral represents the self. This metaphor allows her access to a number of generative concepts that she explores in provocative ways. One of these is continuity:

continuous, the sea-thrust
is powerless against coral

H.D. points toward the perpetual tension between the motion of the sea and the coral's growth. The coral continues to grow despite the friction of the sea that threatens to wear down and dissolve it. In the poem's overt historical aspect (as a WWII poem), continuity suggests the fortitude of Londoners to survive the Blitz. On another level, the continuity explored here suggests life's inexorable striving, the persistence of being despite the dangers presented by the world. Other sea life exhibits this same perserverance:

the shell-fish:
oyster, clam, mollusc

is master-mason planning
the stone marvel

The poem calls attention not just to the continuous production and proliferation of sea life, but to those forms that maintain themselves due to their hard exteriors. In order to withstand the world, one must form a tough exterior. Although this unyielding surface is necessary, she contrasts it with a central softness:

yet that flabby, amorphous hermit
within, like the planet

senses the finite,
its limits its orbit

of being, its house,
temple, fane, shrine

Successful existence, from this perspective, requires a balance of soft and hard, malleable and rigid. H.D. imagines a finite subject. But one doesn't get the sense that this is a "windowless Monad" in the Leibniz sense, for the subject is constantly testing its boundaries and interacting with the world, acting through a relation with the world rather than as a discrete self. The soft center is separated from the world by its hard exterior, but it is, at the same time, always projecting out into that world.

The self is made up of these soft/hard contrasts. Given H.D.'s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, one might extend this set of oppositions to include the unconscious and the conscious. There are desires within us that are amorphous in their unknowability; we can only guess their contours when they emerge. To extend the analogy to Freud's psychoanalytic topology is perhaps warranted given the direction H.D. chooses to develop her contrasts:

it unlocks the portals
at stated intervals:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow

Trusty Wikipedia tells me that coral reproduces sexually by releasing gametes around the full moon. Rather than existing as self-authorizing selves, complete with their own agency, the examples of sea life that H.D. discusses are beholden to a physical world that generates their desire. She describes a "hunger" that cannot be denied; the "tide-flow" caused by the full moon demands a physical response. The subjectivity H.D. describes is continuous, finite, and sexual, but it must always relate with a world that compels it in certain ways. Rather than (what I argue is) the traditional modernist subjectivity that forgoes sensual desire in order to maintain (the illusion of) unity and order, H.D. develops a more dependent and relational model.

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."

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.