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Hilda Doolittle

Imagism

• Detail
• Visual
• Any symbolism is OUTSIDE the poem itself

Poems: they will be from “The Sea Garden” 1916

“Sea Rose”

• Like Wallace Stevens’ multiple views of the pear or of the blackbirds, the sea we see from multiple viewpoints.
• It’s quite a cubism, really

“The Helmsman”

• Has the nature imagery of Georgian poetry, but not its volubility
• Does go in fear of abstractions
• “we parted green from green”
  • this is the sort of cubism I see in her: one of subtle distinctions, another view of how consciousness works
• It tallies up images

“The Shrine”

• Multi-part poem
• Lots of we/you, like the previous poem
• Repetition
• Some O grave, O beautiful action
• You see it’s a passion of Victorian and Romantic poetry but without the superimposition of abstract morals and meaning on top of itself
  • The passion is for the thing, or at most the consciousness or perception of the thing
  • Meanings only reside within the object, never outside of it

“Mid-day”

• “I am anguished,” yes, but still it’s grounded in objective: “a split leaf crackles on the paved floor”
  • a moment in time is SEIZED and embedded inside of a feeling, which does not seem to live outside of that moment
  • she cannot feel anguish w/out the split leaf
• when she says “I am scattered like / the hot shrivelled seeds,” it’s less like an actual metaphor than an image of them juxtaposed and together esp because of the imagery beforehand that places the narrator within a nature world
  • comparisons and metaphors are no longer transcendent, but instead the tenor and the vehicle are all on the same plane
• The progress of the poem which at the beginning has a few statements about her state of mind but then it ends much more about the poplar itself: the feeling has melted into perception
  • “O poplar, you are great / among the hill stones, / while I perish on the path” so that the poplar ends up being king here, not her

“Pursuit”

• Another narrative
• She sees signs of the presence of “you” (the footprint, a snapped stalk, a patch of grass packed down)
  • “I can almost follow the note / where it touched this slender tree”
  • only the material is left
• “You were swift, swift!” and so the material wake of his movement is what actually survives, more than himself
• Like a detective, she uses the evidence of bodily contact w/the material world to figure out his activities, to deduce them
  • But she realizes it can’t tell all: the trail goes cold: “I can find no trace of you / in the larch-cones and the underbrush.”
• So, the only sign of the human is in the material…but the human still manages to escape
  • This is the important info, we feel, and yet it isn’t the body of the poem, which MUST HAVE material: so you find the immaterial in the material. It’s like a compromise.

“The Contest”

• Description of a man wherein the material points must work to express the contest: lines, angles, leaves, gold, silver, etc
• You feel like she’s describing a Greek statue

“Sea Lily”

• It is battered but that makes it stronger
• “You are lifted up”

“The Gift”

• Speaker apologizes for not having “pearls—a wrought clasp—/ a bracelet”
  • The poet offers words
• One image: when the person it’s addressed to has a necklace of seed pearls that breaks and the street kids all rush to pick them up
  • “Life is a scavenger’s pit” but the speaker “rejecting it” avoids it
• The world: “over painted, over lovely”
• She imagines another life—not like the people who dream of a life more intense and beautiful—but for one less intense, less beautiful, “unmoving, quiet,” a hill w/stones not flowers, with “dwarf-trees, twisted, no beauty / to distract—to crowd / madness upon madness”
• This poem is an anti-gift: instead of offering beauty in something, it offers the idea of a different world that wouldn’t work by gifts
  • beauty is “tortured, intense”
  • she wants a life that won’t “forc[e] our strength” (the opposite of “Sea Lily”)
  • she wants “some hideousness to stamp beauty / a mark…on our hearts”
• Her gift is anti-gift: rejecting the logic of the gift; the gift is an escape from gifts
  • She assures us she’s not bitter, but just kind of over-sensitive (“as a child, a flower—any flower / tore my breast”)

“Sheltered Garden”

• Like “The Gift,” this poem goes against some of the assumptions of the imagism we saw before, where the material world is used as fodder for poetry, that is, for beauty
  • She wants experience, she wants the material world, but not limited, nothing excluded: rather, the good and the bad altogether please
• “I have had enough—/ border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies, / herbs, sweet-cress.”
  • b/c it’s too pretty, she longs for “Some sharp swish of a branch” w/”resin” “aromatic, astringent” not the shallow prettiness of “scented pinks”
• Compares herself to a fruit protected from weather or bruising by being packed in straw: they want light
  • “Why not let the pears cling / to the empty branch?”
  • taking too much care of them makes them “bitter” and you need to let them “test their own worth”
  • such fruit will “fall” but will be “fair”
• “Exquisite frost”
  • “beauty without strength, / chokes out life.”

“Sea Poppies”

• Just beautiful writing! It seems like the two previous poems end up being armored against her own tendency to write exquisitely beautiful lines (“Amber husk / fluted with gold, / fruit on the sand / marked with rich grain”)
• Tries to reconcile by seeing that this kind of beauty comes from the harsh area of the “shrub-pines” and is left to “bleach on the boulders” or instead be “drift flung by the sea”
• The calm meadow couldn’t produce such beauty, she says
• So she’s for beauty, but not insipid beauty. She doesn’t want it to be precious. In some ways that’s inverse of what the decadents do: they look at the evil, the twisted, and see how formally it’s beautiful. In this way the decadents actually leech out the evil; for them the evil is incidental and adds to the shock value of the text or painting. Whereas for H D it’s functional: struggle with the bad, the evil, the difficult that creates beauty.

“Garden”

• Reevaluates what the rose is: she says it’s “hard” “cut in rock” like “hail”
• She will “scrape” it to extract the color, rather than caress it as other poets might
• Why is it like that? there’s heat and no wind
  • Same atmospheric condition as the Waste Land
  • “fruit cannot drop / through this thick air”
    • Waste Lands wants life to be revived; but she wants harvest

“Sea Violet”

• “Fragile” yet it faces the wind and survives, even though the shells are “torn”
• Appearance: white, illuminated

“Orchard”

• “(spare us from loveliness)”
  • in parenthesis like it’s coming from outside the poem, an anticipated criticism
  • what’s wrong? she was saying that the falling pear “was not more fleet than I,” which is a little too abstract
• Then she notes in a narrative that she cries out, “spare us the beauty”
• Wants to offer the orchard god the offering of the “untouched” things HE gave HER; it’s like a return, a refusal of a gift

“Hermes of the Ways”

• Her perfectest example!
• “The hard sand breaks, / and the grains of it / are clear as wine”
• Vision of the waves on the opposite shore
• Borders: “where sea-grass tangles with / shore-grass” that’s where Hermes waits
  • the three ways: sea, dunes, orchard
  • where they meet, there’s not a lot of plenteous wonders, “small” stream, “hard” “small” apples with “twisted” boughs and the wind tears sails and creates foam with “teeth” on the narrator

Cities

• “is not waste all this?”
  • b/c everything is all alike
• By the time city maker gets to Philadelphia “the maker of cities grew faint”
  • before cities packed w/beauty (arches, palaces) so beautiful that beauty moved through, within, above people
  • now “dark cells…with no trace of the beauty / men once held so light”
• Yet “is our task the less sweet?” There is still love and the breath of life