The Hieroglyph as an Imagist Poem in “Pallinode”

Helen in Egypt
BY H.D.
(New Directions, 1974)

In the first book of Helen in Egypt, which is named “Pallinode” after classical defenses and apologies that often depicted Helen of Troy, Doolittle establishes several different, but often complimentary, functions for the hieroglyph motif. Because the hieroglyphs operate as symbols, in which layers of meaning are superimposed upon one another, they serve as a metaphor for the works themselves, as imagist poems function in a similar manner. Biographer Janice Robinson argues, “The poem, like the hieroglyph, presents an image that is larger than life.” Pairing such concrete and imagistic poems with interpretive prose sections, the individual works within Helen in Egypt often explore the relationship between subjective and objective through this formal decision. By juxtaposing the immediacy of the image with the secondary language of its interpretation, Doolittle suggests difficulty of attaining a complete “translation” of an objective image. Moreover, she uses the hybrid form of the poem to convey not only the problems of comprehensive interpretation, but also to offer the possibility of ongoing reinterpretation to the reader. The strophes at times attempt to explain phenomena, but one finds these interpretations constantly problematized by the expansive nature of the poetic images these explications evoke. As the individual works progress, their hybrid form allows them to open into increasingly complex networks of images and possible readings, rather than attempting to reduce the image to a single definitive “translation.”

This use of objective images to complicate subjective interpretations remains especially apparent in Doolittle’s sequencing of the prose and verse sections. By offering an explanation and then problematizing it with a host of concrete images, she allows the form of the poem to create an open question for the reader, rather than an exhaustive explanation. In this respect, the poems, like the strange Egyptian friezes Helen encounters, function in a generative fashion. As Elizabeth Caroline Dodd writes in The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet, this emphasis on the evocative image or symbol remains a vestige of Romantic poetic technique, which Modernist poets like Doolittle then revised, often to comment on cultural phenomena like psychoanalysis. Additionally, while at times privileging this type of evocative image over one’s attempt to explain it, Doolittle perceived the two forms of discourse as being more complex than merely a set of binary opposites. H.D. rarely posits “subjective” and “objective” as dichotomous, but rather as vastly different modes of expression, which prove at turns oppositional and complimentary. Throughout the strophes of Helen in Egypt, Doolittle often uses the two forms of discourse to illuminate and comment on one another, at times suggesting reciprocity. In the strophes of “Pallinode,” subjective explanation is used both to convey and to celebrate the multiplicity of meanings that can be taken from a single poetic image.

By juxtaposing the immediacy of the image with the secondary language of its interpretation, Doolittle suggests difficulty of attaining a complete “translation” of an objective image.

Such techniques are exemplified by the seventh poem of the first book of “Pallinode,” which essentially introduces the hieroglyph motif to the text. In this piece, Doolittle uses the hieroglyph as an extended metaphor for the creative process, which, for Helen, involves concentrating a host of subjective ideas into a concrete image. The prose section essentially offers a narrative account of Helen’s first reading of a hieroglyph, which, although filled with concrete images, explains their function to the reader. A “night-bird” that “swooped” toward Helen on the shores of Egypt, for instance, serves to interrupt the heroine’s reverie on the beach with a companion. She writes, for instance, in describing the bird’s flight, “In any case, a night-bird swooped toward them, in their first encounter on the beach.” Within the verse section of the poem, however, the bird acquires a host of subjective interpretations not present in the prose passage. H.D. uses the inherent complexity of the poetic image to offer other possibilities, writing, “I said there is mystery in this place, / I am instructed, I know the script, / the shape of this bird is letter…” She then suggests an affinity between the “time-less” and “ancient” hieroglyphs and the image of the bird itself. Likewise, just as the “night-bird” becomes both “carrion creature” and “a letter” to be interpreted within the context of the poem, H.D. suggests a similarity between the generative quality of the ancient Egyptian friezes and the concrete style of her poems. This multiplicity of interpretations associated with the image, as with Helen’s hieroglyphs, offers possible readings and interpretations long after the secondary language of analysis has reached its expressive capacity.

Likewise, throughout the early poems of “Pallinode,” Doolittle continues to use poetic imagery, along with its myriad possible interpretations, to complicate these explanatory prose sections. In this sense, the poems, on the whole, function much like hieroglyphs. In a later piece in Helen in Egypt, she presents an image, that of the shell, as a loci for infinite possible interpretations within both Helen’s life and the poem, stating in the prose section, “the infinite is reduced to a finite image.” As Doolittle transitions to verse, such poems continually function in a similar fashion as the hieroglyphs that Helen encounters, ultimately illustrating this notion of the infinite being contained within an object. H.D. writes in describing Helen delving into possible meanings that the shell holds for her, “O the tomb, delicate sea-shell, / rock-cut but frail, / the thousand, thousand Greeks // fallen before the walls, / were as one soul, one pearl…” As foreshadowed in the prose passage, the poem itself remains riddled with possible interpretations, which derive from the emotionally fraught context in which the image of the shell is presented to the reader. H.D. conflates the historical in which the object appears, in which the “thousand Greeks” had “fallen before the walls” with the personal significance that the shell holds for Helen. Thus the image of the shell, like that of the “night-bird” in the previous piece, serves a generative function, offering possibilities for the reader not present in the prose paragraph.