Three Imagist Poets
Reading edition
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
(Continued from the May issue)
III
To pass from the poetry of Mr. Aldington to the poetry of H. D. is to pass into another world. For H. D. not only is a modern poet, she is in the best sense of the word a primitive poet. She deals with Greek themes in the same way as the Greeks of the seventh century B. C. might have dealt with them. She is not like Mr. Aldington, a sceptic enamoured of their lost beauty. In a sense she is indifferent to beauty. Something speaks to her in every rock, wave, or pine tree of those sunlit landscapes in which she seems to live. For her the decadence of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the modern world seem never to have existed. She is purely and frankly pagan.
How is it that so many people interested in Imagism seem never to have grasped this essential distinction between her work and Mr. Aldington’s? I must suppose it is because very few people have ever tried to analyze and rank the Imagist poets on any other basis than that of form. But as I have already pointed out, the form of the Imagists is, after all, a matter of lesser importance than the spirit, with which they approach that form. Aldington writes about life: H. D. is almost completely a nature poet. Nature to her is not mere inanimate scenery or beautiful decoration: it is packed with a life and significance which is beyond our individual lives, and all her poems are in a sense acts of worship towards it. Civilization for her does not exist, in our modern sense: she seeks a civilization based only on the complete realization of natural and physical law, without any ethical problems except the need of merging and compounding all one’s desires and emotions in that law. Her poetry is like a series of hymns of some forgotten and primitive religion.
I like to think that this primitive quality in H. D.’s poetry comes from the fact that she is an American. There can be no doubt that we are an uncultivated, a barbarous people. Our ancestors, by migrating to an immense and utterly undeveloped continent, without traditions, were thrown face to face with nature and lost, in consequence, nearly all feeling for their previous culture. If you take a child of civilized parents and bring him up among savages, he will revert to savagery, and in the same way our forefathers, as soon as they ceased to cling to the Atlantic seaboard, changed, through contact with the immense wilderness of the interior, not only mentally but physically. For example, Washington was physically and mentally an English squire of his period: Lincoln, about a hundred years later, was, in appearance and habits of thought, like a man of another race. The Indian, although conquered, gave to his conquerors the Indian way of thinking; or rather the Indian’s surroundings—the endless forest—produced in the newcomers’ minds something of the same way of thinking as the Indian had before their coming. What a pity it has been for art that we, as a nation, did not admit without shame this return to nature! But instead, we were ashamed of our barbarism, and we have striven and are still striving to outdo Europe on its own grounds, with the result that so much of our art seems merely transplanted, exotic, and false. We might have been the Russians of the western hemisphere; instead of that we were almost the provincial English. Instead of Fenimore Cooper and The Song of Hiawatha, we might have given to the world a new national epic. But the opportunity is now lost and whatever fragments of that epic may be written will have to be very sophisticated and in a sense artificial products.
To make an end of this long digression, I can truly say that I find nothing transplanted in H. D.’s poetry. She has borrowed a few names of gods from the early Greek, but that was because she found herself in complete sympathy with this people, who, if we are to believe the modern school of archaeology, were quite as barbarian themselves in the Homeric period as the Red Indians, and who lived in the closest contact with nature. Let us take an early example:
Hermes of the Ways
The hard sand breaks, And the grains of it Are clear as wine. Far off over the leagues of it, The wind, Playing on the wide shore, Piles little ridges, And the great waves Break over it. But more than the many-foamed ways Of the sea, I know him Of the triple path-ways, Hermes, Who awaiteth. Dubious, Facing three ways, Welcoming wayfarers, He whom the sea-orchard Shelters from the west, From the east, Weathers sea-wind: Fronts the great dunes. Wind rushes Over the dunes, And the coarse salt-crusted grass Answers. Heu, It whips round my ankles!
This is only one-half of the poem, but it will serve to show this poet’s method. Here Hermes is identified with the yellow barrier of sand dunes which breaks the wind, and splits it into three directions, as it comes in from the sea. The scenery and the feeling are not Greek. In fact, as someone has pointed out, the whole poem might have been called “The Coast of New Jersey.” But just as Coleridge found a way to give a feeling of the emptiness of the sea by narrating the tale of a legendary voyage on it, so H. D. has given us the eternal quality of the New Jersey coast by identifying its savagery with Greek myth.
The difference between H. D.’s poetry and Aldington’s is therefore a difference between an apparent complexity which cannot be analysed, since it is really the simplest synthesis of primitive feeling, and a studied simplicity which on analysis, reveals itself as something very complex and modern. Aldington’s work when studied carefully, raises questions about our life: H. D. goes deeper and offers us an eternal answer. With the single exception of the Choricos, I know of no work of H. D.’s which is not superior to Aldington’s in rhythm, as I know of no work of Aldington’s which does not seem to have more unsolved problems underlying its thought. Aldington is monodic, H. D. is strophaic: Aldington writes on many themes: H. D. on two or three: H. D.’s art is more perfect within its limits; Aldington’s is more interesting because of its very human imperfection.
There is another short thing of H. D.’s which fulfils perfectly the Greek dictum that a picture is a silent poem, a poem a speaking picture:
Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines, over our rocks. Hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.
A chorus of Oreads might very well have sung that to the wind. Over and over again, H. D. never tires of giving us the sea, the rocks, the pines, the sunlight. There is such a hard brightness of sunlight in some of the poems that it makes us fairly dizzy with its intensity:
O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it sideways. Fruit cannot drop through this thick air: fruit cannot fall into heat that presses up and blunts the points of pears and rounds the grapes. Cut the heat, plough through it, turning it on either side of your path.
These poems are like cries to unknown gods. Some are simply stark in their dramatic magnificence:
The Wind Sleepers
Whiter than the crust left by the tide, we are stung by the hurled sand and the broken shells. We no longer sleep, sleep in the wind, we awoke and fled through the Peiraeic gate. Tear, tear us an altar, tug at the cliff-boulders, pile them with the rough stones. We no longer sleep in the wind. Propitiate us. Chant in a wail that never halts; pace a circle and pay tribute with a song. When the roar of a dropped wave breaks into it, pour meted words of sea-hawks and gulls and sea-birds that cry discords.
Recently H. D. has been giving us longer and more complex poems—condensed dramas of nature and life. Her style has become broader and deeper, and her thought more weighty. I wish I could quote all of a poem of this nature called Sea-Gods. I can only give a brief analysis of it.
The entire poem is a sort of invocation and service of propitiation to the powers of the sea. In its opening lines the poet cries out:
They say there is no hope— sand—drift—rocks—rubble of the sea, the broken hulk of a ship, hung with shreds of rope, pallid under the cracked pitch. They say there is no hope to conjure you.
In short, the gods are merely broken wrecks of the past. The forces of nature cannot help us, it is useless to cry out to them, for they are
—cut, torn, mangled, torn by the stress and beat, no stronger than the strips of sand along your ragged beach.
But, says the poet, in a beautiful passage:
But we bring violets, great masses, single, sweet: wood-violets, stream-violets, violets from a wet marsh, violets in clumps from the hills.
Every kind of violet is brought and strewn on the sea. For what reason? Here is the answer:
You will yet come, you will yet haunt men in ships— you will thunder along the cliff, break—retreat—get fresh strength— gather and pour weight upon the beach. You will bring myrrh-bark, and drift laurel wood from hot coasts; when you hurl, high—high— We will answer with a shout. For you will come, you will answer our taut hearts, you will break the lie of men’s thoughts, and shelter us for our trust.
Has the sea, then, in this poem been used in some way as a symbol of the eternal drift, change and reflux of our life which we have tried to conceal under theories of ethics, of progress, of immortality, of civilization? Perhaps it has. And the violets—what, then, are they but simply the recollections of our earlier sea-state, of our endless, unconscious drift with the tides of life?
I do not propose here to examine H. D.’s mystic philosophy. That philosophy cannot be disengaged from its context. But from a quite recent poem of hers—a poem very beautiful and baffling, I may perhaps be permitted to quote these few lines, wrenched from their context, without comment:
Sleepless nights, I remember the initiates, their gesture, their calm glance, I have heard how, in rapt thought, in vision they speak with another race More beautiful, more intense than this— I reason: another life holds what this lacks: a sea, unmoving, quiet, not forcing our strength to rise to it, beat on beat, a hill not set with black violets, but stones, stones, bare rocks, dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty, to distract—to crowd madness upon madness. Only a still place, and perhaps some outer horror, some hideousness to stamp beauty— on our hearts.
IV
The third poet whose work I have to examine, Mr. F. S. Flint, was already an accomplished writer of rhymed vers libre before he joined the Imagist movement. Mr. Flint’s early work is contained in a volume entitled, In the Net of the Stars, a volume which is still worth reading. The Net of the Stars told a love-story in rather uncommon fashion. The poet and his beloved were presented throughout the book, against the background of the starry sky:
Little knots in the net of light That is held by the infinite Dragon, Night.
This bringing into relation of a quite human love-story, with the impassive and changeless order of the Universe, threw a flavour of supreme irony over the whole book. The work is otherwise remarkable technically. At the date when it was published, 1909, Mr. Flint already revealed that he was an assiduous student of Verhaeren, De Regnier, and other French vers-librists. Hence its importance as a document in the Imagist movement.
But to come to Mr. Flint’s later work which has been assembled under the title of Cadences. We find here a poet, first of all, of sentiment. What, you say, an Imagist who deals with sentiment? My reply to that is, that it is time people understood that an Imagist is free to deal with whatever he chooses, so long as he is sincere and honest about it. Mr. Flint’s sincerity is his finest point. He is in some sense the Paul Verlaine of the Imagist movement. His work gives one the same delicacy of nuance, the same fresh fragrance, the same direct simplicity, the same brooding melancholy. He lacks the strain of coarseness which ruined Verlaine; he has, in place of it, a refined nobility. He has not humour. At times he has attempted irony, but I cannot think he has altogether succeeded in it. He feels life too poignantly to ever mock at life. There remains tenderness, wistful pathos, imaginative beauty.
On reading Mr. Flint one obtains a very distinct impression of Mr. Flint’s personality. One pictures him as a shy, sensitive, lonely dreamer filled with a desire to attain to the noblest and finest life, but somehow kept back from it. Mr. Flint is one of the few poets I know who have preserved intact today a spark of the old lyrical idealism. He is, perhaps, though he may not realize it, even closer to Keats and Shelley than to Verlaine—he might almost be called a modern Shelley. His affiliation with these earlier and greater romantics is more marked because it is an affiliation of spirit, not of form. Mr. Flint’s form has always been his own, and by holding conscientiously to his own form, he has come closer, to my way of thinking, to poets like Keats and Shelley than the innumerable tribe of imitators who have rashly taken the form for the substance.
Here is an early example of Mr. Flint’s work:
London, my beautiful, it is not the sunset, nor the pale green sky shimmering through the curtain of the silver birch, nor the quietness; it is not the hopping of the little birds upon the lawn, nor the darkness stealing over all things that moves me. But as the moon creeps slowly over the treetops among the stars; I think of her, and the glow her passing sheds on men. London, my beautiful, I will climb into the branches to the moonlit treetops that my blood may be cooled by the wind.
And here is another, equally beautiful:
Under the lily shadow, and the gold, and the blue, and the mauve, that the whin and the lilac pour down upon the water, the fishes quiver. Over the green cold leaves, and the rippled silver, and the tarnished copper of its neck and beak, toward the deep black water, beneath the arches, the swan floats slowly. Into the dark of the arch the swan floats, and the black depths of my sorrow bears a white rose of flame.
If Mr. Flint had written nothing else but these two poems he would be immortal for their sake, in spite of his disregard—shared by H. D.—of the convenient device which begins each line of a poem with a capital letter, and of the laws of punctuation. They weave a perfect hypnotic spell in my mind, and they fulfill completely a recent definition of Mr. E. A. Robinson, that poetry is a language which expresses through an emotional reaction something which cannot be said in ordinary speech.
Mr. Flint has given us other poems not less beautiful, but with a strain of greater pathos:
Tired faces, eyes that have never seen the world, bodies that have never lived in air, lips that have never minted speech; they are the clipped and garbled blocking the highway. They swarm and eddy between the banks of glowing shops towards the red meat, the potherbs, the cheapjacks, or surge in before the swift rush of the charging teams; pitiful, ugly, mean, encumbering. Immortal? In a wood watching the shadow of a bird, leap from frond to frond of bracken, I am immortal, perhaps. But these? Their souls are naphtha lamps, guttering in an odour of carious teeth, and I die with them.
Perhaps the last poem in Mr. Flint’s book will give the most complete exposition of his art and vision:
The Star
Bright Star of Life, Who shattered creeds at Bethlehem, And saw In the irradiance of your vision shining, Children and maidens, youths and men and women, Dancing barefoot among the grasses, singing, Dancing, Over the waving flowery meadows; So calmly watched the universe and men, And yet So fiery was the heart behind the light; The creeds have been re-made by men Who followed as you walked abroad, And gathered up their shattered shards; Then with a wax of sticky zeal, Each little piece unto its fellow joined; But over the meadows comes the wind Remembering your voice: O my love, O my golden-haired, my golden-hearted, I will sing this song to you of Him, This golden afternoon. This song of you; For where love is, is He, Whose name has echoed in the halls of Time, Who caught the wise eternal music, ay, And passed it on— For men to sing it since In false and shifting keys— Who hears it now? But the hearts of those who have heard it rightly, Grew great; And behind the walls and barriers of the world, Their voices have gone up in sweetness Unheeded, Yet imminent in the wings and flight of change; Comes there a time when men shall shout it, And say to Life: You have the strength of the seas, And the glory of the vine; You shall have the wisdom of the hills, The daring of the eagle’s wings, The yearning of the swallow’s quest. And, in the mighty organ of the world, Great men shall be as pipes and nations stops To harmonize your Song. O my love, Like a cornfield in summer Is your body to me; Golden and bending with the wind, And on the tallest ear a bird is piping The lonely song. And scarlet poppies thread the golden ways. Out of the purple haze of the sea behind it Appears a white ship sailing, And its passengers are harvesters. But who dares sing of love? The jackals howl; the vultures gorge dead flesh.
In despite of the last line, which is undoubtedly true, and, under the present circumstances, certainly necessary to the context of all that precedes it, yet I feel I cannot share Mr. Flint’s despair of this world. For as long as there is any poet who can have such visions as this is, in such a world as ours, the earth cannot be altogether given over to crime and slaughter. Which one of the Imagists could have given us with so direct and poignant sincerity—scorning all artifice—such a vision of beauty? Or, for that matter, which one of the poets of today?