which seems to say, “Once again we will endeavor to make clear what we
are trying to do. Kindly make an effort to understand.” One may question
the desirability of any preface, but it is not surprising that the
Imagists wish to make clear their aims and purposes. One wonders at the
breath expended in attacks on them. There are disadvantages in this
banding together: if one of the group makes a misstep the whole six are
anathematized; but, after all, it is quite futile, this effort to kill
by ridicule. Denunciation, however fierce, has never yet crushed
anything which had in it the living flame of beauty, as much Imagist
poetry has.
Miss Amy Lowell is represented in this 1916 Anthology by three poems.
The first is her _Patterns_, named by Braithwaite as the first of the
five best poems of 1915. It is difficult to quote, as the poem must be
taken in its entirety to appreciate its beauty. Here are the first two
stanzas:
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan.
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
Studying it again one finds new beauties—the delicacy of the occasional
rhyme, used as a musician uses the flute in an orchestra, the curious
“pattern” of the rhythm, which cannot be defined and yet fits the theme
with inimitable grace; the unforgettable picture of the garden with its
stiff paths, its white fountain, its carelessly gorgeous flowers, and
the woman walking down the path with slow and stately tread. Her head is
straight and high, pink and silver is her stiff brocaded gown, yet one
knows that underneath it throbs a human heart for which there is no
place in the pattern. Here is certainly a new way of conveying emotion.
We are stirred by the passion of the poem up to its terrible
climax—“Christ! what are patterns for?”
A masterpiece this poem, one to learn and repeat and make one’s own.
There follows by Miss Lowell _A Spring Day_ in polyphonic prose, a
series of word pictures scintillating with color and dancing light. The
day has five color divisions: the Bath, where “little spots of sunshine
lie on the surface of the water and dance, and their reflections wabble
deliciously over the ceiling”; the Breakfast Table, where golden coffee,
yellow butter and silver and white make another symphony. Then comes the
Walk, with more color, from boys with black and red, amber and blue
marbles, “spitting crimson” when they are hit, to a man’s hat careering
down the street in front of white dust “jarring the sunlight into spokes
of rose-color and green.” Next comes Midday and Afternoon, then Night
and Sleep. “Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour your blue and purple
dreams into my ears.... Pale blue lavender, you are the color of the sky
when it is fresh-washed and fair.”
Miss Lowell also includes her amazing paraphrase of Stravinsky’s
_Grotesques_, too amazing for an unmusical person’s comment.
Richard Aldington has seven poems. The finest is a short Elizabethan
lyric named _After Two Years_. It is a lovely bit, but why it should be
published in an “Imagist” collection no man may say. Its delicate beauty
is indefinable.
After Two Years
She is all so slight
And tender and white
As a May morning.
She walks without hood
At dusk. It is good
To hear her sing.
It is God’s will
That I shall love her still
As He loves Mary.
And night and day
I will go forth to pray
That she loves me.
She is as gold
Lovely, and far more cold.
Do thou pray with me,
For if I win grace
To kiss twice her face
God has done well to me.
Aldington’s _Eros and Psyche_ has both beauty and distinction, but no
one of the seven poems by him can compare with his _Choricos_ in the
Anthology of 1915. That is an achievement not easily repeated.
Perhaps H. D. is the purest Imagist of the group. To the uninitiated she
is the most obscure because the most abstract. She loves the sea and
high, windy places and her poems catch something of the freshness one
feels standing on a headland, beaten and buffeted by the wind and the
salt spray. Nature is to her as a living presence, sometimes gentle,
more often cruel. She vibrates to beauty as sensitively as a Greek
dryad, and in reading her poems one has a curious sense of a worshipper
offering incense to the gods. Here are some lines from the last one of
the four poems she contributes. It is called _Temple—The Cliff_:
High—high and no hill-goat
Tramples—no mountain-sheep
Has set foot on your fine grass.
You lift, you are the world-edge,
Pillar for the sky-arch.
The world heaved—
We are next to the sky.
Over us, sea-hawks shout,
Gulls sweep past.
The terrible breakers are silent.
Shall I hurl myself from here.
Shall I leap and be nearer you?
Shall I drop, beloved, beloved.
Over me the wind swirls.
I have stood on your portal
And I know—
You are further than this,
Still further on another cliff.
In their passion for clearness, for the exact word, Imagists often use
certain words which sound ugly. In this poem of fourteen stanzas, the
word “lurch” occurs three times. It is not a pretty word, it does not
suggest a graceful action, yet apparently no other will do.
John Gould Fletcher is, first of all, pictorial. His conception of
Imagism differs slightly, it would seem, from his confreres. His
imagination is so strong he sees significance in every changing image of
this changing world. His rhythm is so vague that sometimes it is hardly
discoverable. His poetry could be printed about as well in block as in
line, as doubtless he would admit. He loves color—revels, glories, riots
in color; and he has a way of seeing resemblances to dragons and
serpents and other ungodly things in the simplest of natural
phenomena—trees or clouds or rain or even sunrise. His vocabulary is
astonishing. He plunges into a sea of words and plays with them, tossing
them up like jewels to sparkle in the sun, or burying them in pits to
see if they will still shine. He loves words, caresses them with a
lover’s touch, kisses them for luck, and then hurls them together in
such an incredible combination that the critics blink. A serious workman
withal, with much to say seething in his mind and a determination to say
it in his own way. There is perhaps no line in the six poems in this
Anthology equal to the much-quoted “Vermillion pavilion against a jade
balustrade.” _The Mexican Quarter_ is a poem of forty-two lines wherein
is depicted and symbolized the very spirit of Mexican life and love. It
ends with an unexpected little lyric. One can almost hear the twang of
the guitar. Here is Fletcher’s picture of _An Unquiet Street_:
By day and night this street is not still:
Omnibuses with red tail-lamps,
Taxicabs with shiny eyes,
Rumble, shunning its ugliness.
It is corrugated with wheel-ruts,
It is dented and pockmarked with traffic,
If has no time for sleep.
It heaves its old scarred countenance
Skyward between the buildings
And never says a word.
On rainy nights
It dully gleams
Like the cold tarnished scales of a snake:
And over it hang arc-lamps,
Blue-white death-lilies on black stems.
I think only a poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling could see in our
municipal arc lamps “blue-white death-lilies on black stems,” but I am
going to look more carefully after this.
F. S. Flint has given us more beauty in his earlier work, notably in
_London My Beautiful_ and _The Swan_, than is to be found here, save
perhaps in _Chalfont Saint Giles_, which has simplicity and dignified
stateliness. It is a picture of village folk gravely filing into church,
past ivy and lilac, as the bell rings. The sadness of England in
war-time is in the picture. Here are two stanzas:
Walk quietly
along the mossy paths;
the stones of the humble dead
are hidden behind the blue mantle
of their forget-me-nots;
and before one grave so hidden
a widow kneels, with head bowed,
and the crape falling
over her shoulders.
The bells for evening church are ringing,
and the people come gravely
and with red, sun-burnt faces
through the gates in the wall.
D. H. Lawrence contributes what may be considered, except for
_Patterns_, the most notable poem in the book, _Erinnyes_, although
again why it should be called Imagism is a mystery. It is certainly,
however, a poem, and a profound and beautiful one. In its form and its
long, slow, melancholy rhythm it suggests Aldington’s _Choricos_, and
the theme is the same—Death. Here are five stanzas:
There are so many dead,
Many have died unconsenting,
Theirs ghosts are angry, unappeased.
They come back, over the white sea, in the mist,
Invisible, trooping home, the unassuaged ghosts
Endlessly returning on the uneasy sea.
What do they want, the ghosts, what is it
They demand as they stand in menace over against us?
How shall we now appease whom we have raised up?
Must we open the doors, and admit them, receive them home,
And in the silence, reverently, welcome them,
And give them place and honour and service meet?
For one year’s space, attend on our angry dead,
Soothe them with service and honour, and silence meet,
Strengthen, prepare them for the journey hence,
Then lead them to the gates of the unknown,
And bid farewell, oh stately travellers,
And wait till they are lost upon our sight.
There is another poem of Lawrence’s called _Perfidy_ that gives an
elusive sense of horror and calamity. This effect lies partially in the
five-line stanza formation with the first, third, and fourth lines
rhyming. There is no particular reason for calling this poem Imagism
either; but we have agreed by now, I trust, that is not our first
consideration. No less a person than Miss Lowell herself gives us
justification in this viewpoint, for in a review of the poems of
Aldington and Flint in the June _Poetry Review_ she says, “Let us take
these little volumes as poetry pure and simple, forgetting schools and
creeds.”
There are thirty-two poems in all in the book. One person will like this
one best, another that. Suffice that the book is a valuable contribution
to contemporary literature.
----------
[1] _Some Imagist Poets, 1916: An Annual Anthology. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin._
Three Imagist Poets
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.