Trilogy: The Walls Do Not Fall; Tribute to the Angels; The Flowering of the Rod, by H.D. Readers' notes by Aliki Barnstone

New Directions, 244 pages, $10.95

Hilda Doolittle -- H.D., as she always signed her poems -- was the caryatid of modernism. Friend, lover, or disciple of figures as various as Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, Paul Robeson, and Sigmund Freud, she dabbled in early experimental film, underwent psychoanalysis and electroconvulsive therapy, and at last found peace in the love of historical novelist Winifred Bryher. Most of all, she wrote. Ezra Pound invented the word imagiste, and developed the new poetics that would describe it, for poems she had already written by 1912; she completed her final volume of poetry, the forward-looking Helen in Egypt, in 1961, just before her death. For many years, she upheld a Classical simplicity of voice and style as a personal revolt against overstuffed excesses of the 19th century's literary heritage: her lean, unrhymed bursts of vision and feeling helped to purify the language, much as the experimental work of Isadora Duncan or Loie Fuller altered the course of dance.

By World War II, H.D. was living in London, and the trauma of the Blitz affected her deeply, as it did Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, and, most famously, T.S. Eliot. What she experienced was not so much breakdown as breakthrough; the result was the great achievement of her later career, the often breathtaking group of long poems that appeared between 1944 and 1946 in London. First published together in 1973 by New Directions, they have now been reissued with able and respectful notes by Aliki Barnstone.

For H.D., the strange, selective destruction by bombs --

. . . another sliced wall
where poor utensils show
like rare objects in a museum;

Pompeii has nothing to teach us . . .

"The Walls Do Not Fall"

-- makes for a kind of mystical archaeology; the divisions between past and present, death and life, creator and creation become porous. It is in this fragile state that the poet receives a vision of the Lady, the female Godhead who is at once the Virgin Mary, the soul, Holy Wisdom, and the essence of all the goddesses of antiquity, carrying a book:

a tale of a Fisherman,
a tale of a jar or jars,

the same -- different -- the same attributes,
different yet the same as before.

"The Walls Do Not Fall"

Trilogy is the record of the retrieval and retelling of these entwined stories -- of the fisher-Christ, and the jar of unguent or myrrh that becomes associated with the Lady, who is at once Christ's mother and the despised Mary Magdalene. In this long journey, H.D.'s philhellenism is not so much abandoned as amplified to include Egyptian, Hebrew, and Christian mythology. The loose narrative takes in legend, dream, and symbol; magi, flowers, and angels. The sequence concludes, with touching restraint, almost as it had begun, with the vision of a woman bearing a gift:

the fragrance came from the bundle of myrrh
she held in her arms.

"The Flowering of the Rod"

Myrrh is bitter but portends greatness, just as war cannot prevent the triumph of the word. Almost inevitably, Trilogy has been compared with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the other great civilian poem of World War II. But H.D. had long since discarded the clean and finicky craftsmanship that characterizes Quartets, and where Eliot's epiphany is English and Christian, hers is universal.

There are flaws in these poems, to be sure -- H.D.'s clarity is sometimes compromised by a certain loose prosiness, and she seems to credit ancient names with almost magical power -- but Trilogy is one of the great long poetry sequences of the century, and we should be grateful to New Directions for republishing it with loving attention.