My Poets by Maureen N. McLane

Author:Maureen N. McLane [McLane, Maureen N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466875050
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Neither honey nor bee for me.

(SAPPHO)

And it is true that H.D. swims in some murky waters, and that after the first toughened hard-soft, sweet-bitter Imagist lyrics her poems are often slack—

and it is true that, as my love said upon reading H.D.’s “Leda,” one might well respond, “Well, isn’t it slightly ridiculous?—‘Ah kingly kiss’??!”

And one could say as well that it is all too typical of her verse to collapse into a kind of postcoital inertia, nothing to mar the bliss, no blow or burst of thought or rhythm to interrupt the warm quivering / of the red swan’s breast.

All this could be said.

And also: Whirl up sea!

And also: Heu, it whips round my ankles!

* * *

Much of the force of great modernist works arises from their desublimating impulse channeled into shatteringly, newly adequate forms—their fuck you, here it is, take it for all in all, we shall not be constrained by gentility, there will be swagger sex and frying liver and shitting and ads and trams and masturbating and shell shock and newspaper datelines and porous consciousness and airplanes and abortions and cross-dressers and drumming Negroes and tragic Sapphic liaisons, etc.—

H.D. thought D. H. Lawrence’s later poems not sublimated enough. She rejected them entirely. One might find a poem like “Leda” entirely too sublimated. More broadly, her mythic tool kit, her cultural surfing moving ever to the fore in the later work, is for some readers an impediment—what is all this Egyptian stuff, not to mention the ongoing repertoire of Greek figures, masks, and plots: Why not say what happened? as Robert Lowell came to ask.

This perhaps marks an impoverished sense of “what happens.”

Where H.D. is like Yeats for me, is like my memory of the first impact of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” on me, is like Donne’s “Batter My Heart” for me, is like certain stanzas and lyrics in Shelley for me, is like Sappho, is indeed often My Sappho, is in her bodily force—

her kinesthetics of transmission—

for some of her poems bypassed my brain and registered directly on the nerve endings.

All these poets have had for me a distinctly somatic power. One could say they cast a spell—albeit different spells.

Thus

though I sang in my chains like the sea—

there was a ringing

up so many floating bells down

and I wondered

what had that flower to do with being white?

and trembled, for

what but design of darkness to appall

if design govern in a thing so small

and found myself

turning and turning in the widening gyre

and knew

my mind is reft

and said

my soul is an enchanted boat

born on the silver waves of thy sweet singing

and faltered as

strain upon strain,

sound surging upon sound

makes my brain blind

and I found myself

nor ever chaste except you ravish me—

I sat on a narrow bed in an English house I read in a large book and found sound surging upon sound / making my brain blind—O I am eager for you!

To talk about H.D. is almost inevitably to talk about sexuality—not least because she so often invites it, particularly in the poems titled after Sapphic fragments.

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