8 Klinik Hirslanden. The clinic in Zürich at which H.D. received treatment for a broken hip.
9 Frances Gregg [Josepha]. A childhood friend of Hilda from Philadelphia. They traveled to Europe together in 1911.
10 Richard Aldington. British poet, essayist, and translator. H.D. and Aldington were married in 1913, separated in 1919, and divorced in 1938. With Pound and H.D., Aldington was an original member of the “imagist” group of poets.
11 Bryher. Pen name (later legalized) of Winifred Ellerman, British novelist, and friend of H.D.
12 May Sinclair. British novelist, 1870-1946. The Divine Fire, London, 1904.
13 Séraphita. A mystical novella by Balzac, first published in 1835, whose protagonist is an androgynous figure variously called Séraphita or Séraphitus. Much of the book is devoted to an explication of Swedenborg’s doctrines of theosophy.
14 10ème Jour lunaire. This prayer is quoted from Le Kabbale pratique by Robert Ambelain, Paris, 1951, p. 220.
15 Merkur, January 1958. The article by Peter Demetz, entitled “Marginalien: Ezra Pounds Pisaner Gesänge,” appeared in Merkur, January 1958, v. 12, pp. 97-100. It intersperses commentary on the Pisan Cantos with a report on a visit by Demetz with Pound, at St. Elizabeth’s. He describes Pound’s profile as that of a Raubkatze (predatory cat), and refers to him as “den heimlichen Kaiser der amerikanischen Dichtung”: the hidden emperor of American poetry.
16 15ème Jour lunaire. From Le Kabbale pratique by Robert Ambelain, p. 222.
17 “They asked him to leave.” Pound was an assistant professor of Romance languages at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana in 1907-1908. He did not fit in well at the small Indiana college (he later wrote that they considered him too much “the Latin quarter type”: see Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, New York, 1970, p. 43). He was asked to resign his position after a landlady discovered a woman in his rooms.
18 “Maenad, bassarid.” “Maelid and bassarid among lynxes,” from the “lynx-hymn” of Canto 79.
19 “strange spells of old deity.” From “Cino,” A Lume Spento, 1908. See the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, New York, 1976, p. 10.
20 Dorothy Shakespear. Pound met Dorothy Shakespear in 1909; they were married April 20, 1914.
21 “There is a stir of dust from old leaves …” Canto 79.
22 Mosher reprint. The Romance of Tristram and Iseult, retold by J. Bedier, tr. by H. Belloc, Portland, Me., Thomas Bird Mosher, 1907.
23 The Gadfly, New York, 1897. A historical novel by Ethel Voynich (1864-1960), set in mid-19th-century Italy. It is strongly anticlerical; the hero, the illegitimate son of an Italian prelate, is involved in revolutionary activities, and also publishes political verse-lampoons for the Republican movement under the pseudonym “The Gadfly.” His signature is the sketch of a gadfly with spread wings; he is slightly crippled, and as a youth spent some time as a “zany” in a traveling circus. He is eventually captured, court-martialed, and executed.
24 Ezra Pound, Dichtung und Prosa. Trans. Eva Hesse, Zürich, Im Verlag der Arche, 1953.
25 “pig stye.” In 1954 Pound had written to H.D. concerning her interest in Freud: “You got into the wrong pig stye, ma chére. But not too late to climb out.” Quoted in Pearson’s foreword to Tribute to Freud, Boston, 1974.
26 Motive and Method in the Cantos of Ezra Pound, ed. Lewis Leary, New York, 1954.
27 Frobenius. Leo Viktor Frobenius (1873-1938), German cultural anthropologist and archaeologist. Guy Davenport, “Pound and Frobenius,” in Leary, pp. 33-59.
28 An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Peter Russell, New York, 1950. In response to Peter Russell’s request for an article in honor of Pound’s 65th birthday, H.D. wrote a letter which contained a brief memoir of Pound, the seed of End to Torment. The letter was never published, and was eventually sold to H. Alan Clodd and then to Norman Holmes Pearson. It is now in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University.
29 “San Cristoforo …’’ Canto 93.
30 Undine. American painter who became a friend of Pound during the St. Elizabeth’s years.
31 Poetry. “An Exchange on Ezra Pound,” Poetry, XCI, 3 (December 1957), pp. 209-11. The correspondence concerns the poor quality of the F.B.I. transcripts of Pound’s broadcasts on Rome Radio and the consequent merits of the treason charge placed against him.
32 “Helen and Achilles.” Helen in Egypt, New York, 1961.
33 “Pomona, Pomona. Christo Re, Dio Sole.” Cantos 79 and 82.
34 “Arche Verlag.” Dichtung und Prosa, ed. Eva Hesse, Zürich, 1953.
35 A Lume Spento, 1908-1958, Milan, 1958. A selection from Pound’s earliest published poems, with a few poems from the San Trovaso Notebook of 1908.
36 “Venetian Night Litany.” In A Quinzaine for this Yule (1908); see the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, p. 60: “Night Litany.” The autograph manuscript, to which H.D. refers, was published in facsimile in A Lume Spento, 1908-1958.
37 “she danced like a pink moth in the shrubbery.” From “Au Jardin,” Canzoni (1911); see Collected Early Poems, p. 174.
38 Undine’s little book. Published in Milan; a small booklet of reproductions of paintings, with an introduction by Ezra Pound.
39 Mrs. Shakespear’s death. Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy Pound’s mother, died in October 1938. The Fifth Decad of Cantos, London and New York, 1937.
40 The Children’s Crusade by Marcel Schwob, trans. H. C. Greene, Portland, Me., 1905. A book of prose-poems written from the viewpoint of various participants in the Children’s Crusade of 1212. (First published, Boston, 1898.)
41 “The Goodly Fere.” “Ballad of the Goodly Fere,” Exultations, 1909; see Collected Early Poems, p. 112.
42 “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose.” Canto 80.
43 “Klages’ Cosmogonic Eros.” Ludwig Klages, Vom Kosmogonischen Eros, Jena, 1930.
44 Margaret Snively [Pratt], A friend of H.D. and Pound in Wyncote.
45 “some dull opiate to the brain, and Lethe-wards had sunk.” See Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains / One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.”
46 Modern American Poetry, ed. Conrad Aiken, New York, 1927. See illustration, p. 59.
47 José Vasquez Amaral. Friend of Pound and Undine; translator of the Cantos into Spanish.
48 “Evadne.” In Selected Poems of H.D., New York, 1957, p. 38.
49 Denton Welch, A Voice Through a Cloud, London, 1951.
50 Confucius to Cummings. Ed. Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann, New York, 1964.
“HILDA’S BOOK”
“Hilda’s Book” is a small (13.7 cm. × 10.5 cm.) book, hand-bound and sewn in vellum, of 57 leaves (first leaf handwritten on vellum), with vellum closures. Due to heat or water damage, the first (vellum) leaf has fused to the paper leaf behind it (partially obscuring the poem beginning, “I strove a little book,” which has been deciphered with the help of another manuscript in the Pound Archive of the C.A.L., Beinecke Library, Yale University). The last paper leaf has also fused to the back vellum. The title, “Hilda’s Book,” is handwritten in black ink, in ornamental script, on the front cover. It has partially faded with time.
All but two of the poems are typed, with a blue ribbon; the first poem (“Child of the grass”) is handwritten in black ink in ornamental script on the opening vellum leaf, and some of the final words have worn away with age. Another poem (“Sancta Patrona”) is handwritten on the verso of leaf 55 (following the second page of “The Wind”), perhaps as an afterthought.
Pound’s corrections to the poems are handwritten in black ink or red pencil, often obscure because of smudging or fading. Where possible I have followed Pound’s notations in establishing the texts of the poems, although some readings are uncertain because of multiple corrections or illegibility of the notes due to age. A few of the poems show extensive handwritten revision, but most are typed fair copies.
The poems in “Hilda’s
Book” were composed during the first years of Pound’s friendship with Hilda Doolittle, 1905-07, the period recalled in her memoir, End to Torment. Four of the poems were later published, with some changes, in Pound’s early volumes: “La Donzella Beata,” “Li Bel Chasteus,” “Era Venuta” (as “Comraderie”), and “The Tree.” The poem entitled “To draw back into the soul of things. Pax” is included in another version (“Sonnet of the August Calm”) in the San Trovaso Notebook of 1908, as is “The Banners” (“Fratello Mio Zephyrus”). The poems from the San Trovaso Notebook are published in the Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound (New York, 1976). Variant readings and publication histories of the early poems are given in the notes to that book. The poems of “Hilda’s Book,” and others in the San Trovaso Notebook, are among many other early poems addressed to Hilda (as “Is-hilda” or “Ysolt”) which remain unpublished, and are now in the Pound Archive at Yale.
M.K.
Child of the grass
The years pass Above us
Shadows of air All these shall Love us
Winds for our fellows
The browns and the yellows
Of autumn our colors
Now at our life’s morn. Be we well sworn
Ne’er to grow older
Our spirits be bolder At meeting
Than e’er before All the old lore
Of the forests & woodways
Shall aid us: Keep we the bond & seal
Ne’er shall we feel
Aught of sorrow
[ … ]
Let light [?] flow about thee
As […?] a cloak of air [?]
I strove a little book to make for her,
Quaint bound, as ’twere in parchment very old,
That all my dearest words of her should hold,
Wherein I speak of mystic wings that whirr
Above me when within my soul do stir
Strange holy longings
That may not be told
Wherein all autumn’s crimson and fine gold
And wold smells subtle as far-wandered myrrh
Should be as burden to my heart’s own song.
I pray thee love these wildered words of mine:
Tho I be weak, is beauty alway strong,
So be they cup-kiss to the mingled wine
That life shall pour for us life’s ways among.
Ecco il libro: for the book is thine.
Being alone where the way was full of dust, I said
“Era mea
In qua terra
Dulce myrrtii floribus
Rosa amoris
Via erroris
Ad te coram veniam”
And afterwards being come to a woodland place where the sun was warm amid the autumn, my lips, striving to speak for my heart, formed those words which here follow.
La Donzella Beata
Soul
Caught in the rose hued mesh
Of o’er fair earthly flesh
Stooped you again to bear
This thing for me
And be rare light
For me, gold white
In the shadowy path I tread?
Surely a bolder maid art thou
Than one in tearful fearful longing
That would wait Lily-cinctured
Star-diademed at the gate
Of high heaven crying that I should come
To thee.
The Wings
A wondrous holiness hath touched me
And I have felt the whirring of its wings
Above me, Lifting me above all terrene things
As her fingers fluttered into mine
Its wings whirring above me as it passed
I know no thing therelike, lest it be
A lapping wind among the pines
Half shadowed of a hidden moon
A wind that presseth close
and kisseth not
But whirreth, soft as light
Of twilit streams in hidden ways
This is base thereto and unhallowed …
Her fingers layed on mine in fluttering benediction
And above the whirring of all-holy wings.
Ver Novum
Thou that art sweeter than all orchards’ breath
And clearer than the sun gleam after rain
Thou that savest my soul’s self from death
As scorpion’s is, of self-inflicted pain
Thou that dost ever make demand for the best I have to give
Gentle to utmost courteousy bidding only my pure-purged spirits live:
Thou that spellest ever gold from out my dross
Mage powerful and subtly sweet
Gathering fragments that there be no loss
Behold the brighter gains lie at thy feet.
If any flower mortescent lay in sun-withering dust
If any old forgotten sweetness of a former drink
Naught but stilt fragrance of autumnal flowers
Mnemonic of spring’s bloom and parody of powers
That make the spring the mistress of our earth—
If such a perfume of a dulled rebirth
Lingered, obliviate with o’er mistrust,
Marcescent, fading on the dolorous brink
That border is to that marasmic sea
Where all desire’s harmony
Tendeth and endeth in sea monotone
Blendeth wave and wind and rocks most drear
Into dull sub-harmonies of light; out grown
From man’s compass of intelligence,
Where love and fear meet
Having ceased to be:
All this, and such disconsolate finery
As doth remain in this gaunt castle of my heart
Thou gatherest of thy clemency
Sifting the fair and foul apart,
Thou weavest for thy self a sun-gold bower
By subtily incanted raed
Every unfavorable and ill-happed hour
Turneth blind and potently is stayed
Before the threshold of thy dwelling place
Holy, as beneath all-holy wings
Some sacred covenant had passed thereby
Wondrous as wind murmurings
That night thy fingers laid on mine their benediction
When thru the interfoliate strings
Joy sang among God’s earthly trees
Yea in this house of thine that I have found at last
Meseemeth a high heaven’s antepast
And thou thyself art unto me
Both as the glory head and sun
Casting thine own anthelion
Thru this dull mist
My soul was wont to be.
To One That Journeyeth with Me
“Naethless, whither thou goest I will go”
Let, Dear, this sweet thing be, if be it may
But hear this truth for truth,
Let hence and alway whither soe’er I wander there I know
Thy presence, if the waning wind move slow
Thru woodlands where the sun’s last vassals stray
Or if the dawn with shimmering array
Doth spy the land where eastward peaks bend low.
Yea all day long as one not wholly seen
Nor ever wholly lost unto my sight
Thou mak’st me company for love’s sweet sake
Wherefor this praising from my heart I make
To one that brav’st the way with me for night
Or day, and drinks with me the soft wind and the keen.
Domina
My Lady is tall and fair to see
She swayeth as a poplar tree
When the wind bloweth merrily
Her eyes are grey as the grey of the sea
Not clouded much to trouble me
When the wind bloweth merrily
My Lady’s glance is fair and straight
My Lady’s smile is changed of late
Tho the wind bloweth merrily
Some new soul in her eyes I
see
Not as year-syne she greeteth me
When the wind bloweth merrily