Hilda Doolittle - Hermetic Definition

Remembering, H.D. wrote of September 1912: In London in fall, mist and fog. E.P. in B.M. tea-shop says, Hermes, Orchard, Acon will do. They did for many years in the public mind and for some critics still.

But for H.D., the early manner of her Imagist poems was inadequate. Poems like her war trilogy The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels, and The Flowering of the Rod and the hitherto unpublished poems in Hermetic Definition go beyond what her early admirers referred to as crystalline. They retain the energy that goes into the essence of gems, but in a deeper, more probing daemonic drive that carried her through old mysteries into new life. What had been chiefly Greek metaphor became increasingly myth, joined by Egyptian parallels and memories of the Moravian background of her childhood. The spirit caught back into the old mysteries of Egypt and Greece, she wrote. When I took her home to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, she stood in the aisle of the Central Church, remembering love feasts and the Unitas Fratrum.

She was fascinated by Zinzendorf and his re-establishment of a branch of the dispersed or lost Church of Provence, the Church of Love that we touch on in By Avon River. It was not casual when, as we left the church, she signed the Register and added Baptized Moravian. She had learned to tell the stories of the stars and constellations when she showed visiting schoolchildren the heavens through the telescope of the Flower Observatory, near Philadelphia, where her father was astronomer. Visits to Greece and to Egypt deepened her knowledge. A sense of fuller significance came later. As E. B. B.

Butler, a friend, wrote in answer to a letter from her, I entirely agree about him: a great mythologist to whom we all owe an incalculable debt on the poetic side. As H.D. herself wrote elsewhere, Without the analysis and the illuminating doctrine or philosophy of Sigmund Freud, I would hardly have found the clue or the bridge between the child-life, the memories of peaceful Bethlehem and the orgy of destruction, later to be witnessed and lived through in London. That outer threat and constant reminder of death drove me inward.... The war was both tutor and goad; with it she began a new period of creativity. What Freud gave her was a sense of how to link the tribal myths with the personal dream, and to help her understand multiple representations of inner drives.

Like Yeats and like Pound, both friends, she could be comprehensive in her reference. Living as she did in Switzerland, she was accustomed to moving back and forth between English, German, and French in her conversation. Living in literature, she could equally move between myths and metaphors of multiple cultures, understanding with what relevance they could be interchanged. Like many Freudians, she became quasi-Jungian and could bring the cabala, astrology, magic, Christianity, classical and Egyptian mythology, and personal experience into a joint sense of Ancient Wisdom. This sense of ancient wisdom is what hermetic definition is. H.D. had her core myth, certain that women are individually seeking, as one woman, fragments of the Eternal Lover. had her core myth, certain that women are individually seeking, as one woman, fragments of the Eternal Lover.

As the Eternal Lover has been scattered or dissociated, so she in her search for him. In Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal), she seeks for him in contemporary time.... She seeks him in fantasy, myth. So she puts it. So she also puts it in the three long poems of Hermetic Definition. The title piece is such a search, built on fantasy and myth, but none the less real or meaningful because chance encounters are made legendary.

Robert Ambelains Dans lombre des cathdrales (1939) is a ring of keys to references. Her copy was well marked. The book has to do with the Christianization of hermeticism, or vice versa as one prefers. In any event, its scheme permits a liaison between Christian symbolism as evidenced in the decoration of the portals of Notre Dame and traditional hermetic schemes like those lingering from Isis and Bar-Isis, her son. The rose is not only the rose which unfolds slowly in Ezra Pounds Canto 106 but the Rose-Croix as well, and all symbolic roses. Lines in French from Ambelain interweave with lines from Saint-John Perses Exil and Anabase.

The figure of the chief of the Paris Bureau of Newsweek, a Haitian, blends with that of Perse and of Rafer Johnson, the decathlon star who reminded her of Olympia. Lionel Durand saw H.D. only twice: in April 1960 in Switzerland, where he had come to interview her after the publication of Bid Me to Live, and in May in New York, where she had gone to receive the gold medal for poetry awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died of a heart attack nine months after they first met. She briefly thought of calling the poem Notre-Dame dAmour; Durand was simply a member of the congregation whose reality was myth. Perse she met only at the ceremony where the medal was presented.

She had broken her hip in 1956, and never again could walk except with difficulty. Sitting behind her chair, he reached out to help her. As H.D. wrote me later, she remembered the gallant Lger Lgers gesture as I staggered no swayed gracefully from the readers desk where she had made her speech of acceptance. But mostly she remembered that they were, both, poets. The crowded Academy was the Grove of Academe, to balance the solitude of the room at Ksnacht where resin and pine-cone significantly burned.

The final section, Star of Day, is one of death and rebirth: the poet as seeker now become mother, fecund in the creation of still another fragment of the recurrent myth. Sagesse is a hermetic definition, an owl as of Athena, and Owl Calendrier Sacr or Heures Sacres to give the poems alternative titles that define what H.D. was after. The circumstances were those of her broken hip and long hours abed. Ambelain figures again. This time it is his La Kabbale pratique (1951) to which one can turn for definitions.

More conveniently, one can use Gustav Davidsons A Dictionary of Angels (1967), which includes the references in Sagesse. At one time, H.D. wrote, I studied intimately Robert Ambelains long list of presiding angels. There are three for each hour. Thus, there would be about twelve for the night hours between 2 and Dawn when I can not sleep. I try to write in bed, she wrote Richard Aldington, her former husband, the few letters, the odd poems.

The poems are about an Owl, a captive and in prison. She herself felt captive and imprisoned at Ksnacht, on Lake Zrich, cared for by Schwester Annie and the other nurses, visited occasionally by another patient, and watched over by a German doctor on the staff much interested and a little puzzled by her poems. The occasion was a picture of an owl in the London zoo, published in The Listener for May 9, 1957. I began the poem, June 9th, she wrote me. I get Listener late, and often dont look over the copies for some time. There were echoes in the caged bird of Pound in Pisa and at St.

Elizabeths Hospital. Even more there was, as I have said, herself caged. There was herself looking at herself. There was the balancing imagined little girl at the zoo looking at the owl. May those who file before you feel something of what you are that God is kept within the narrow confines of a cage, a pen.... The poem plays back and forth between the scenes of the child and her family in London, and the scenes in the sanitarium at Ksnacht.

The German questions; he is Germain also: an echo of the eighteenth-century magician and contemporary of Cagliostro and Casanova whom she had introduced as a character with his own mystery in her as-yet-unpublished Moravian novel,