"We have a secret. We are alive": H.D.'s Trilogy as a Response to War

Trilogy is H.D.'s response to the trials of the Second World War, the "orgy of destructions . . . to be witnessed and lived through in London." ² It seems both helpful and unproblematic to begin with such a straightforward statement. After all, "The Walls Do Not Fall," "Tribute to the Angels," and "The Flowering of the Rod" is a sequence that advertises itself as a fresh response to the here-and-now of the conflict: "The Walls Do Not Fall" is dedicated

To Bryher
for Karnak 1923
from London 1942 ³

The other poems in Trilogy even include the dates of their composition, "Tribute to the Angels" closing with the tag "London / May 17-31, 1944," ⁴ "The Flowering of the Rod" with "London / December 18-31, 1944." ⁵ H.D. flags the dates to place herself firmly in the center of the war experience, announcing to her audience--even before they read the first line of the first poem--that she is not just living through the war years, but doing so in London, writing poetry as the Blitz rages around her. The reference to Karnak may be for Bryher alone to understand, but "from London 1942" is the context that all readers should take with them into the poem itself; through this epigraph H.D. neatly conveys that her poetry has both personal and global concerns.

The effect of the datelines at the end of the second and third parts of the Trilogy is slightly different: the later dates are a survivor's badge, a signal that the poet has not tried to escape London or its dangers. Further, by allowing readers to see when the poems were written, H.D. is not only inviting them to compare their memories of the time with her own but also showing that these two long poems were the work of fifteen and fourteen days, respectively. Poetry that can be completed so quickly must be the product of intense labor and extraordinary inspiration: that surely is the subtext of such a plain statement. By including these specific dates, H.D. suggests to the readers--significantly, at the end of their reading--that what they have experienced is not the war mediated by H.D.'s particular response, but the war itself, with H.D. merely as its conduit. Readers are thus reminded that this poetry is not concerned with conventional notions of speaking to posterity from the enclaves of high art: this is the poet as war correspondent, reporting back from the civilian front line, and offering readers nothing less than the zeitgeist. In Trilogy, as Dianne Chisholm confirms, "H.D. points to herself as the poet of her age." ⁶

However, there are problems with an approach to the work that posits an uncomplicated equivalence between poetry and war. The first is the poetry itself, which advertises an openly discursive response to the war but is actually the most complex work of H.D.'s poetic career, a work that defies immediate comprehension. Second is the critical response to Trilogy, which has consistently shied away from addressing it as war poetry, as if that were too obvious a response and therefore undeserving of sustained attention. Criticism in recent years has chosen to acknowledge that Trilogy is rooted in the Second World War but has then moved on to read the text from other perspectives. Thus, certain critics see Trilogy as being less about the war and more an exploration of H.D.'s work with Freud, which she was documenting in prose (published as "Writing on the Wall") at the same time as she was composing Trilogy. The poem has also been read as being concerned not with war but with the problems inherent in gender relationships and the historical shaping of gender...