H.D. and the Image
BY Rachel Connor
(Manchester University Press, 2005)

In establishing this reading of the hieroglyph motif, the poet draws from the imagist tradition of her early career, namely as she imbues concrete images with many conflicting possible readings, which derive not from the image itself but from its surrounding context in the poem. Differing from the Symbolist tradition in this respect, her tendency to use images to illuminate and complicate other images also was characteristic of early twentieth century modernist writers, such as as Ezra Pound and Marianne Moore. Described by Susan McCabe in her book Cinematic Modernism as being “implicitly a reaction to the ‘vague’ excesses and emotions of Decadent” poetry, this new aesthetic resembled emergent film technologies in its use of images to evoke an emotional response from the spectator or reader, largely as a result of the context in which the image appears. Likewise, as critic Rachel Connor suggests in her book H.D. and the Image, this aspect of early modernist writing continued to remain an integral part of her writing as she diverged from the Imagist tradition in the strict sense, experimenting with long poems, novels, and memoir. Connor quotes H.D. on the role of the poetic image in her work, “For what is crystal or any gem but the concentrated essence of the rough matrix, of the energy, either of over-intense heat or over-intense cold that projects it. The poem as a whole… contains that essence or that symbol, symbol of concentration and of… energy.” Connor presents the poetic images as being a locus for the recurring themes and emotional undertones of in H.D.’s work, an idea that emerged during the Imagist period and proved highly influential throughout her career.

Just as Helen presents the poetic image within Helen in Egypt as acquiring multiple and often contradictory significances from the reader, Doolittle’s early poems imbue tangible things with more figurative possible interpretations.

The descriptions of hieroglyphic images in the seventh poem of the first book of “Pallinode” remain comparable to the poetic images in works like “Sea Rose” and “Sea Iris” from H.D.’s first volume of Imagist poetry, Sea Garden, which she published in 1916. In early works like these, Doolittle tends to imbue concrete images, in this case flowers, with a host of possible interpretations as a result of the other surrounding images and descriptions that complicate them. In “Sea Rose,” the “harsh rose, / marred with stint of petals” conveys the speaker’s feelings of abandonment and powerlessness through the poet’s presentation of the desolate, inhospitable landscape that surrounds the flower. Just as the flower itself remains “caught in the drift” after it has been “flung on the sand,” Doolittle implies that the speaker of the poem has suffered a similar fate, which he or she imposes onto the landscape being viewed and described, in effect allowing the image of the flower several possible levels of interpretation, which range from literal to metaphorical and autobiographical. Just as Helen presents the poetic image within Helen in Egypt as acquiring multiple and often contradictory significances from the reader, Doolittle’s early poems imbue tangible things with more figurative possible interpretations. Similarly, “Sea Iris” invokes a “brittle flower” and the inhabitable earth that surrounds it to convey the speaker’s feeling of fragility, which he or she also reads onto the landscape being viewed. As in Helen in Egypt, our poet uses the poetic image to illustrate subjective concepts for the reader, frequently rendering such things as flowers and “night-birds” representative of larger, more difficult concepts through the images that surround them and the contexts in which they appear.

While similar in this respect, the strophes of Helen in Egypt prove distinctive in their incorporation of sustained images and motifs. As the work unfolds, images not only complicate other images, but they reappear within the epic poem, constantly acquiring new possibilities for interpretation. In this respect, the style of the poem reflects H.D.’s view of psychoanalysis as a process of discovery, in which new readings of one’s life remain inevitable. As the book unfolds, she allows the hieroglyph motif to encapsulate an ever-broadening definition of both “image” and “interpretation,” in which the boundaries between the poetic image and lived experience remain constantly in flux.