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H. D., “Imagiste”? With their allusive language and attention to verbal music, H. D.’s poems are evidence that an artist who adheres too strictly to a reigning dogma or school is less likely to accomplish great things than an artist who uses the dogma creatively. A “complex” of qualities , to use the Imagist term, never inheres straightforwardly in H. D.’s lyrics as it does in Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Though Pound’s poem evokes images and sentiments far removed from the original image of the faces in the crowd, it does so only to render the original image as completely and accurately as possible. Even the ironic reverse image that serves as the poem’s undercurrent, the contrast with the harmonious quietness of nature, only focuses more power on the emotionally ambiguous scene of urban alienation. H. D. works in the opposite direction. Her apparent concentration on concrete images is almost sneaky, because it is just in this process that she is able to focus the poem on metaphysical or emotional realities that she could never present directly without bogging the poem down in abstraction: The shrivelled seeds are spilt on the path– the grass bends with dust, the grass slips under its cracked leaf; yet far beyond the spent seed-pods, 39 Originally appeared in Cumberland Poetry Review (Fall 1987). and the blackened stalks of mint, the poplar is bright on the hill —“Mid-Day” Amber husk, Buted with gold, fruit on the sand, marked with a rich grain. —“Sea-Poppies” In the Arst poem, the subjectively logical judgment “yet” orders and emphasizes the contrast between the scene described with the emotionally loaded past participles “shrivelled,” “cracked,” “spent,” and “blackened” and the Anal image of the bright tree on the hill. Neither image is the ultimate point of the poem in the Imagist sense. The contrast between the two images, and the implied emotional state of the speaker who notices that contrast, is the poem’s real subject. In “Sea Poppies,” again, the repetitive, passionate, subjective metaphors that describe the Bowers focus attention on the speaker’s feelings much more than on the image of the Bowers, or possibly the speaker’s feelings and the speaker’s perceptions of the Bowers are inseparable. Unlike the singular, self-conscious metaphors in Fletcher’s “Blue Symphony ” or Aldington’s “Images,” the metaphors of fruit, grain, and gold in “Sea Poppies” are engrained in the description and cannot be separated from the description, objectiAed, and regarded almost as images in themselves. H. D.’s “The Helmsman” is about the sea, and evokes the sea at every point, but the word “sea” never appears, and the only word referring to it before the last stanza is “tang.” Her “Adonis” states the abstract idea of death explicitly, then describes it allusively . H. D. submits the word “bee” to the same via negativa in the Arst two stanzas of “The Orchard.” In these cases, H. D. shows the importance of an image to a poem by writing the poem around the image. We become aware of the size and shape of the gap left by the omission of the word, and are thus tantalized into a recognition of its importance to the poem, in a sophisticated and almost subversive alteration of the Imagistic ideal of “direct treatment of the thing.” 40 H. D.’s poems lend words a ritualistic power through repetition that has more to do with the ear than with any of the stated principles of Imagism. The repetitive musicality of the Arst three lines below, with their three-beat swing, might almost have been thought by Pound to hold a slight echo of the metronome. They demonstrate H. D.’s sense of the power of words-as-words, not just as tools for capturing an image: The Bash of sun on the snow, the fringe of light and the drift, the crest and the hill-shadow— ah, surely now I forget, ah, splendour, my goddess turns: or was it the sudden heat beneath quivering of molten Besh, of veins, purple as violets? —“Hippolytus Temporizes” In “Sea Heroes” and “The Islands,” H. D. chants Greek names as if they were a spell. She will recite the names of Bowers so unusual that they have little Imagistic value, or repeat a simple word continually in such a way that a new dimension is added...

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