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"Re-Worked Freely": H.D. and the Greek Anthology

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“RE-WORKED FREELY”: H.D. AND THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY

Jane Benacquista

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2019 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certifythat we have read the dissertation prepared by Jane Benacquista, titled H.D. and the Greek Anthology, and recommend that it be accepted as fulfillingthe dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date: December 7, 2018 Tho,-j. s Willard-"-") £)(� -----��------½ . -....-,,=.------Date: December 7, 2018 Jerold le � -� +-----,..,t,1A'+-,,rlf--+-----,,___--��------Date: December 7, 2018 Su�t'f'

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the finalcopies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certifythat I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

Date: December 7, 2018 'homas Willard 3

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an

advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be

made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: Jane Benacquista 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the many people who supported me during the dissertation process. For years of moral and intellectual support without which I would never have been able to complete this process, thank you to Tom Willard, Jerry Hogle, Susan Briante, Micki Long, Matt Kundert,

Mark Benacquista, Stella Benacquista, Carie Schneider, Aran Donovan, and Kimberly Wine.

For invaluable help translating epigrams, I am grateful to Lynn Kozak, Bella Vivante, and Laura Camp. 2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables………………………………………………………………………6

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………...6

Abbreviations, Translations, and Transliterations of Greek……………………….7

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………….8

Introduction………………………………………………………………………...9

Chapter One: Garland/Garden…………………………………………………….19

Chapter Two: A Voyage…………………………………………………………..54

Chapter Three: Translations of Meleager in Heliodora………………………...... 86

Conclusion: The Anthology of Helen…………………………………………… 113

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………147

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.1……………………………………………………………………….….31

Table 1.2………………………………………………………………………….39

Table 1.3………………………………………………………………………….44

Table 1.4………………………………………………………………………….45

Table 1.5………………………………………………………………………….49

Table 2.1………………………………………………………………………….70

Table 2.2………………………………………………………………………….72

Table 2.3………………………………………………………………………….73

Table 2.4………………………………………………………………………….80

Table 3.1………………………………………………………………………….97

Table 3.2…………………………………………………………………………103

Table 3.3…………………………………………………………………………105

Table 3.4…………………………………………………………………………108

Table 4.1…………………………………………………………………………138

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1……………………………………………………………………………119

Figure 2……………………………………………………………………………131

ABBREVIATIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND TRANSLITERATIONS OF GREEK

The most complete edition of the Greek Anthology is a five-volume set from Loeb

Library edited and translated by W. R. Paton. The Anthology is divided into sixteen books, and each poem is numbered. Unless otherwise specified, citations are from the Paton translation and are given with the volume number followed by the epigram number (e.g., 3.123 refers to epigram

123 in volume 3).

When I discuss Greek texts, I include the italicized transliteration. I use the American

Library Association-Library of Congress (ALA-LC) Romanization standards.

ABSTRACT

H.D.’s treatment of the classics offers alternatives to dominant reception traditions, which

have used classics to fortify a fascist aesthetics. Her anthological syncretism puts classical

elements into new juxtapositions, emphasizing the poet’s role as arranger and creating a poetics

of relations rather than of essences. My dissertation shows how H.D.’s engagement with the

Greek Anthology informed the development of her radical classical reception.

Ancient Greek epigram is an instrument of repurposing. Through careful arrangement of

relationships, it engineers a moment of metamorphosis, be it the transformation of an object into

a symbol through dedication or the transformation of a concept through deviant variation. The

Greek Anthology holds hundreds of these little instruments together in contingent assemblage: it

is really an anthology of ratios, of relationships. There are the core relationships defined within

each epigram, but also the relationships between the epigrams, which are arranged in various

substructures and taxonomies. The anthology’s relational poetics is revived by H.D., and I show how she usurps its strategies of repetition, variation, and transformative juxtaposition to challenge our understanding of what is beautiful in the classics. My project culminates in a new

reading of H.D.’s reception of Helen of Troy in Helen in Egypt, one that allows us to recognize it

as a malleable anthology that binds various genres and traditions.

INTRODUCTION

The Glitter of Epigram

Small talk is a game with counters that are small, well-crafted utterances, variations of familiar comments by players who have played the game before. In H.D.’s story “Ear-ring,” set in the crowded dining room of a cosmopolitan hotel in 1920 Athens, narrator Madelon Thorpe sits amidst small talk, alternately repulsed by its affectation and predictability and intrigued by its movement and energy:

Talk ran high; no matter how decorous the undertone, one felt there was some high

voltage, some high-explosive power, about the simplest utterance. One almost saw glitter

of epigram, running like a magnesium flare from table to table; large table-circles and

smaller circles, seemed to repeat collective messages in different languages.

(“Ear-ring” 9-10)

Madelon emphasizes the behavior and circulation of language: speakers and their subjects seem pretext for the development of higher order patterns of meaning. On the “decorous” level, the language is presented in aural terms (“undertone,” “utterance”), but on another level it is patterned energy to be experienced visually: something to be read. Madelon’s association of this experience with epigram, a genre intensely interested in the relationship between orality and writing, is not accidental: like small talk, epigram is a game in which the pieces are small, carefully-crafted word structures, variations on old formulae put forth by players familiar with the game’s parameters. For both, brevity and strict formal features encourage experiments with repetition, variation, and citation, and with the seeking of large-scale patterns created from a discourse composed of such experiments.

H.D. is able to detail epigrammatic phenomena in “Ear-ring” because of her work with

Hellenistic epigram and the Greek Anthology, in which she taps into a poetic tradition of re- working, re-scaling, and re-arranging poetic structures. Madelon’s transformative recognition of small talk’s “glitter” parallels the poetic transformation that, in this tradition, makes new poems possible through rereading and rewriting old poems’ patterns, as well as through attention to larger-scale patterns in which existing poems can be arranged.

Epigram’s presence is explicit in H.D.’s early work: her first publication, in Poetry,

January 1913, consisted of three poems under the heading “Verses, Translations, and Reflections from the [Greek] Anthology.” These poems were signed “H.D. Imagiste,” and famously launched the Imagist movement, which like epigram championed precision, economy, and clarity. Epigram’s influence is clear in 1916’s Sea Garden and persists throughout her career, playing a crucial role in her third book of poems, Heliodora (1924). Study of epigram’s influence in these earlier works helps reveal an epigrammatic poetics in her later works, too, especially Helen in Egypt (1961). The recognition of epigrammatic characteristics helps us draw new connections between her earlier and later periods, and between her lyrical and non-lyrical strategies.

Archaic Epigram

Ancient Greek epigram is usually divided into three historical phases: archaic, classical, and Hellenistic. Archaic epigrams (before 500 BCE) were dedicatory or memorial inscriptions that supplemented tombs or dedicated objects. These epigrams were not received as literary and names of authors were not recorded. Speakers were the dead, mourners, dedicators, or the inscribed objects themselves. Inscribed epigram was intensely bound to its surroundings, making reference to nearby objects or environmental features as well as to local culture.Archaic epigram

is an instrument of repurposing. It marks a moment of transformation, when something enters another order. In dedicatory epigram, that something is the dedicated object, as in this example:

Stand here, thou murderous spear, no longer drip from thy brazen barb the dismal blood

of foes; but resting in the high marble house of Athene, announce the bravery of Cretan

Echecratidas. (6.23)

Done with the work of spearing enemies through, the spear now becomes symbolic, as does any dedicated object: the epigram markes its movement from the realm of everyday use to a special realm of signifying. A sepulchral epigram does something similar for the entombed.

This is not thy monument, Euripides, but thou art the memorial of it, for by thy glory is

this monument encompassed. (7.46)

Just as thou wast giving birth to the spring of thy honeyed hymns, and beginning to sing

with thy swan-like voice, Fate, mistress of the distaff that spins the thread, bore thee over

the wide lake of the dead to Acheron. But the beautiful work, Erinna, of thy verse cries

aloud that thou art not dead, but joinest in the dance of the Muses. (7.12)

These two epigrams mark their subjects’ transition from mortality to something beyond it. Still others are “declamatory,” associating their surroundings with an event or deity.

We do worship to horned Pan, the walker on the crags, the leader of the Nymphs, who

dwelleth in this house of rock, praying him to look with favour on all us who came to this

constant fountain and quenched our thirst. (9.142)

This epigram helps transform its surroundings into a sacred place. In each example, the epigram records or inaugurates newly configured relationships or boundaries.

Hellenistic Epigram

Archaic epigram is one part of a whole mechanism; it is inscribed, embedded into its context, language tightly bound to “the real world.” Apparently completely contiguous with their surroundings, many epigrams point to or even speak as the concrete object that accompanies them, and reference geographical features. In contrast to oral poetry, these poems are designed to be read in one particular context. Hellenistic epigram, on the other hand, is not inscribed in stone, but collected in books. In the intervening classical period (c 500-323 BCE), epigrams began to be collected in books. When an inscribed epigram was transferred into a book (e.g., because it was mentioned in writing by a historian or philosopher) and used for rhetorical or aesthetic purposes; instead of its original purpose of remembering an event of dedication or burial, its status seemed altered. Epigram began to toy with the tension between the form’s original context

(stone) and its new one (book). This play became more pronounced in the Hellenistic period

(323-31 BCE), when epigram became more self-referential and self-consciously textual. Toward the end of this period, Meleager of Gadara created his “Garland,” or Anthology, of epigrams, figuring in his introductory poem or “proem” the poems and poets included as flowers. Meleager arranged poems—his own, his contemporaries’, and some much earlier Hellenistic works—not into chronological or geographical groupings or by author, as we are used to in anthologies today, but by the similarity and influence between epigrams, with older ones woven into sequences of their own variations, imitations, and allusions.

The intense interest in the relationship between contemporary and antecedent texts embodied by Meleager’s project was part of a larger literary movement. The “geographical, political, social, and economic changes” stemming from Alexander’s conquests, Kathryn

Gutzwiller explains, “profoundly affected the intellectual and literary production of the following era”:

The elite members of the new multi-ethnic kingdoms developed a shared identity as

Hellenes, based on attachment to earlier Greek culture now viewed as a fixed element of

a bygone era. . . Although Athens remained the center for philosophical thought, the

courts of the monarchs served as magnets for aspiring and talented authors. The most

spectacular of these was the court of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, who established poets

and scholars alike in the Museum and Library complex that graced the new capital at

Alexandria. (Guide 1)

Because they defined themselves in terms of a “bygone era” and were concerned with collection, transmission, and archival of texts of that era, and because their own writing played with the era’s literature and made specific allusion to antecedent texts a major characteristic, Hellenistic authors are sometimes seen as copyists in a derogatory sense, mere imitators of Athenian originals. Related to such accusations of unoriginality are assertions that ‘the elite members of multiethnic kingdoms” who comprised the library-centric literary communities were decadents, aesthetes, corrupted by Asiatic influence and luxury.

Changes in Reception

The history of modern Anglo reception of Hellenistic epigram is complicated. For now it is fair enough to say that, on the whole, until around 1980, many considered the Greek

Anthology important and interesting, but few considered its poems art. Exemplary is this comment on Meleager from A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page in 1965. While allowing Meleager

“uncommon fertility of invention, and an ingenuity unsurpassed in the Anthology,” they add:

the limitations both of matter and of form which he inherited, and which he accepted

without question, are such that it seems to us a misunderstanding of the essential nature

of his work to call him a “real poet” or to look for anything “fresh with joyous

experience” [what J.A. Symonds said he found in Meleager]. (2.591)

Ironically, Gow and Page’s “Hellenistic Epigrams,” which provided unprecedented ease of access to much of the Anthology through its excellent commentary and indexes, brought new aesthetic and critical interest to the genre that they say by Meleager’s time “had long been degenerating into a parlour-game” (2.591). Current scholarship treats Meleager like a “real poet.”

A revival of interest in both H.D and Hellenistic epigram had its nascence in the 1960s and ‘70s, reached full exuberance by the ‘80s and ‘90s, and is still going strong. The positive reappraisal in both cases can be explained by theoretical developments related to structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. The most relevant ones here include new interest in the distinction between speech and writing and between orality and literacy, new interest in the function of the reader (reception), and Jacques Derrida’s influential ideas about the iterability of language, which complicated attempts to distinguish between copy and original and led to a destabilizing of many other familiar dichotomies (e.g., spoken/written, male/female, author/reader).

Scholars came to appreciate in Meleager and other Hellenistic epigrammatists some of the very qualities which were previously disdained. According to Gutzwiller’s 1997 article “The

Poetics of Editing in Meleager’s Garland,” “The older view of Meleager as bombastic, sentimental, and unoriginal has been replaced with an appreciation of his ability to rework the earlier epigrammatic tradition into poems of striking originality” (169). The term “poetics of editing” indicates a revaluation of poetics of citation, recycling, and re-visioning older works that was previously deemed “unoriginal.” This is indicative of new thinking about authorial agency

and a new willingness, especially in light of new technologies, to see acts of copying, transcribing, re-arranging, etc. as authorship, not just in studies of ancient epigram, but in poetry communities generally.

Also enjoying a new enthusiasm in the later twentieth century was H.D., for largely similar reasons: dichotomy-dismantling movements in the wake of deconstruction allowed scholars to see both her work and its earlier negative reception in different light. In 1975, Susan

Friedman’s “Who Buried H.D.? A Poet, Her Critics, and Her Place in the ‘Literary Tradition’” wonders why so much of H.D.’s work was at that time not read, especially the longer poems.

People read Paterson and Four Quartets; why not Helen in Egypt? Friedman concludes that

H.D.’s neglect was due to dismissive treatment by critics deploying problematic assumptions about gender. Noting how frequently H.D. is considered "escapist" by such critics, she writes:

When Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Yeats show that same rejection of materialist

conceptions of reality, they are praised for their struggle to deal with the ultimate

questions of human existence. It is a kind of double talk emerging out of a hidden bias

that makes Eliot deeply religious, Pound profound, Crane prophetic, Williams archetypal,

and Yeats visionary while the same phenomenon in H.D. is "escapist." (808)

Friedman’s article is a turning point: from then on, H.D. has enjoyed plenty of critical attention.

Between then and now, critics have fully “unburied” H.D. and produced a fairly steady stream of good scholarship about her; new editions of her texts continue to be brought forth.

H.D.’s Classicism

Given the convergent rise of interest in H.D. and interest in epigram, one might expect more work to have been done on the presence of the Greek Anthology in H.D.’s work, but much of the new enthusiasm for H.D. has not focused primarily on her engagement with the classics.

The best book to do so is still Eileen Gregory’s 1997 H.D. and Hellenism: Classic Lines, which argues persuasively for the depth and scope of H.D.’s engagement with ancient Greek texts, and shows H.D. placing herself “in a line descending from Alexandria” (3). Gregory’s arguments are in harmony with and openly influenced by feminist criticism from earlier in H.D.’s “revival,” especially the work of Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, which touches on

H.D.’s relationship to antecedent texts and her work’s evocation of lineages and canons bordered differently than the traditional one, with its insufficient metaphors of propagation and clean lines of descent, as Gregory explains:

In using words and phrases such as ‘line,’ ‘lineage,’ ‘transmission,” . . . I adopt self-

consciously a traditionally classic model of literary history, aristocratic and patrilineal,

because this is undeniably the model in which classicisms have imagined themselves and

which H.D. too had to negotiate. “Dissemination,” in the sense suggested by Jacques

Derrida, may be closer to H.D.’s apprehension of her nonlinear relation to ancient

writers. According to Barbara Johnson, dissemination, for Derrida, “is what subverts all

such recuperative gestures of mastery. It is what foils the attempt to progress in an

orderly way toward meaning or knowledge, what breaks the circuit of intentions or

expectations through some ungovernable excess or loss” . . . . H.D. consistently veers

from the linearity, seminality, and totality of certain classical models, preferring in her

affiliations and in her imagination of literary history something like an antimodel

involving dissemination, dispersion, and diaspora. (2)

Like Gregory’s, my study shows the influence of Greek texts on H.D.’s by showing how H.D.’s writing is, on multiple levels, about engagement with those texts, and about the plenitude of meanings each text engenders.

Classical Reception

“Classical reception studies” is a name for a kind of criticism done by people—usually people in Classics, Literature, or Comparative Studies/Literature departments—who consider the relationships between classical texts and modern or contemporary ones. Usually, the critic seeks to complicate traditional notions that (a) classical texts have a set meaning that we seek to uncover to the greatest extent possible, and (b) that the relationship between classical texts and later ones is hierarchized: the classical text influences, the later text is influenced. Classical reception studies look into the way that later texts influence classical ones, or the how later texts receive a classical one. The term “reception” that “classical reception” borrows gained popularity around the nineteen-sixties, when thinkers began looking for meaning in the relationship between the reader and the text more than in the relationship between the author and the text.

Charles Martindale, whose 1993 book Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception was an important rallying cry for classical reception studies, tempers the reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss with some Derrida to argue for a more modern way of approaching the classics:

In terms of the hermeneutics I have been defending, a classic becomes a text whose

‘iterability’ is a function of its capacity, which includes the authority vested in its

reception, for continued re-appropriations by readers. As a result of these appropriations

the works so appropriated become richer as they are projected through history, because

more ‘voices’ have made themselves heard within them. In this way reception theory can

reconcile tradition and culturalism with progress in an empowering synthesis. (28)

Classical reception studies offers exciting intersections with H.D. studies because, throughout her career, she practices a future-oriented classical reception.

Chapters

In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between Meleager’s Garland on H.D.’s Sea

Garden, showing Meleager’s influence on H.D.’s principles of arrangement. In the second chapter, I argue that Greek Anthology poem 9.144 acts as a close constraint on the production of

“The Shrine,” and that such a relationship is as complex as translation. In the third chapter, I look at how H.D. incorporates translations of Meleager into her own poems in a way that both celebrates and subverts his authority. Finally, I conclude by tracing the influence of epigram and the Greek Anthology in H.D.’s late epic Helen in Egypt.

CHAPTER ONE: GARLAND/GARDEN

Argument

H.D.’s Sea Garden (1916) includes five poems— “Sea Rose,” “Sea Violet,” “Sea

Poppies,” “Sea Lily,” and “Sea Iris” —addressing flowers that are too close to the sea. The poems appear periodically: they are the first (rose), seventh (lily), twelfth (poppies), sixteenth

(violet), and twenty-fourth (iris) poems (out of 26 total). They share words, tropes, and small-

scale metrical patterns. Yet each has its own distinctions or deviations that violate a pattern

suggested by the other four.

“Marred,” “stunted,” “flung,” “torn,” and “shattered,” these sea flowers are about to

disintegrate and cross the boundary between individuation and the great undifferentiated. These

shoreline flowers are analogous to H.D.’s small, irregular “Imagist” poems. Like Baudelaire’s

fleurs du mal, H.D.’s “harsh” flowers are meant to startle us into reconsidering beauty. Being

transported by the beauty of these flowers (poems) leads us to reconsider past flowers (poems)

that have transported us — fuller, sweeter-smelling, smooth-edged ones, whose attributes have shaped our conception of beauty— and reconsider what makes them beautiful, and what it is that these ragged ones have that nonetheless binds them to the tradition. During earlier transports, we may have assumed our pleasure-reaction was contingent upon the object’s symmetry or apparently self-contained wholeness. That understanding is challenged by this new transport, which seems to violate what we then understood to be the parameters of beauty, revealing our previous understanding as open to supplementation or revision.

According to T.S. Eliot, this revolutionary re-vision is precisely what marks and is required of any “really new” work that presumes to enter a tradition:

what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens

simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it . . . . for order to persist after the

supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and

so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted.

(44)

Eliot’s inquiry into the relations and proportions between “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”

especially his admiration for poets possessed of “a feeling that the whole of the literature of

Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a

simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” is indicative of the synchronic

“historical sense” of modernist poets of classical reception, like himself, Pound, and H.D., and

which is evidenced in their experiments with forms inspired by collage and palimpsest.

Sea Garden, though it has been accused of ahistoricity and pseudo-Greekness, reveals itself to be complexly bound to the allusive Hellenistic tradition when read in the context of the

Anthology. But because of the Anthology’s marginal canonical status, only the broadest observations on its structural influence and the importance of its flower analogies have been made. Sea Garden is influenced by Meleager’s Garland not just in that individual Sea Garden poems interact with individual Garland poems or that they both present poems as flowers, but also in a broader, structural way. Like the Garland, Sea Garden’s internal and external resonances invite reconsideration of the boundaries, functional but violable, of poetic entities.

It matters little that H.D.’s poems are original compositions while Meleager strings

together his own poems with those of 40-odd other poets. What matters is the emphasis on the

poet as an arranger of text—-lines, figures, whole poems—- that was already present in the

tradition. To gain entry into this tradition, a collection and its poems must not only be carefully

arranged internally, but also encode implications about the larger arrangement of the tradition

itself, one of which is that poetic inspiration is a byproduct of catalytic re-combinations of

poetry’s constitutive elements. To see Garland’s influence in Sea Garden’s structural principles

and tropes, we need to look at how both books attempt to create or reveal patterns on multiple

levels, from a line of verse to a tradition. I draw primarily from H.D.’s “sea flower” poems and a

prooemium (introductory poem or “proem”) and six-poem sequence from Meleager’s Garland.

H.D.’s Sea Flowers

The sea-flower poems are variations of each other and proceed similarly. Each describes

its flower’s em-battered state (the rose is “caught in the drift” and “flung on the sand”; the violet

is “fragile,” “fronting all the wind”; the poppies are “caught” “among wet pebbles / and drift

flung by the sea”; the lily is “shattered in the wind”; the iris, “tangled in sand,” is “broken”).

Then, the flowers are contrasted to less-battered brethren (the sea rose to the “spice-rose” and “a wet rose / single on a stem”; the white sea violet to “the greater blue violets”; the poppies to those of a fragrant, inland meadow; the lily to “great heads” that “drift on temple steps”). The effect is a stripping or flecking away of the flower’s recognizability as itself, which, in its liminal, assaulted position, neither its shape nor its context can guarantee. So stripped down, the flower’s outlines flicker and it flirts with metamorphosis: the poppies look like spilled treasure, and the violet seems more ship or shell than flower as it “fragile as agate, / lies fronting all the wind / among the torn shells.” “Myrtle bark / is flecked from” the lily, and the iris, “painted like a fresh prow,” “prints a shadow/ like a thin twig.” When the flowers in the poems are stripped of their species-likeness, they gain in likeness to other things. For this state of promiscuous suggestiveness, the poet would have us prize them above all others, declaring for each an unparalleled fragrance or color.

Commentary on the sea-flower poems has stressed their defiance of norms and

exploration of alternative models. Susan Stanford Friedman argues in Penelope’s Web (1990)

that H.D. “praises what is despised and rejects what is typically valued” with the sea-flower

poems, which are “scattered strategically to give the book coherence” (56). She uses “Sea Rose”

as an example, claiming that “the meagre rose, wild and wind-blown in the sand, is an object correlative for the poet’s own difference, her flight from Victorian femininity” (57). While her focus is on gender, Friedman’s arguments make it clear that the sea-flower poems’ challenge to constraining Victorian conceptions of femininity is also a challenge to constraining Victorian conceptions of poetic form; she points to the poems’ “scattered, internal off-rhymes.”

Friedman’s repeated use of “scattered” in describing these poems emphasizes their endorsement of non-linear models of poetic transmission. Adalaide Morris, in How to Live/ What to Do (2003), finds this endorsement in H.D.’s exploration of the tension between sound, text, and meaning, detectable (when considered in the context of the entire collection) in the title of

“Sea Rose” itself:

As if labeling a specimen in an herbarium, H.D.’s title gives genus and species for this

plant and specifies the terrain in which it can be found. Even as the title’s text sets the

poem’s taxonomy, however, its sounds unsettle the syntax. In the push-pull of H.D.’s

poetics, the lexemes “sea” and “rose” hold their denotations while the phonemes /se/ and

/roz/ slide toward new configurations: “see rose,” “sea rows,” “sea (a)rose,” even, at the

far reach of the echo, “z-rows” or “zeroes.” As H.D.’s title forms and reforms, adjectives

turn to nouns, nouns become verbs, and what at first appear to be whole words

reconstitute themselves as initial or terminal syllables. In these oscillations, the title—by

turns label, command, metaphor, statement, and evaluation—releases an energy inimical

to conventions of order. (19-20)

Like Friedman, Morris presents the sea-flower poems as challenging “conventions of order.” The

“slide toward new configurations” Morris finds arising from the tension between lexical and

phonemic also exists on every other level of the sea-flower poems, with their protean imagery

and mutating metrical patterns. The title’s internal “oscillations” are paralleled by similar

oscillations in the flowers each poem conjures, which are frozen, but also charged with kinetic

energy. This is related to the flowers’ evanescence: just about to be destroyed and rendered

incapable of any sort of signification, the flowers have the greatest capacity to signify.

Cassandra Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siécle (1996) reads “the mangled, brittle, yet triumphant sea flowers” in the context of their most important poetico-floral

precursors other than the Greeks: poets associated with Decadent Aestheticism, especially

Swinburne (and through him Baudelaire). Like Friedman’s and Morris’, her reading emphasizes

the sea flowers’ defiance of linear models of propagation and their suggestion of alternatives.

Laity notes that “although Sea Garden's flowers are deliberately left ungendered, they do suggest

an ‘unnatural’ androgyny: Like Swinburne's boyish huntress in Atalanta in Calydon, H.D.'s sea

flower is a sexual misfit ‘not like the natural flower of things / That grows and bears and brings

forth fruit and die’” (50). Laity’s study demonstrates how H.D. both draws from and subverts

established poetic treatments of flowers, displacing deviant flowers from their alexandrine or

decasyllabic lines and arranging them within her own asymmetrical and broken lineation. The

complexity of H.D.’s interactions with predecessor texts in Sea Garden made evident in Laity’s

study signals the importance of that collection’s self-conscious attempt to place itself within a

tradition by deviating from it while specifically and consciously alluding to it (i.e., by varying it).

Gregory’s comments on Sea Garden’s flowers are in line with her point that “H.D.’s

early poetry has deliberate affiliation with a wide and diverse set of lyric predecessors and

contemporaries, among which it makes its own fairly large claims for poetic presence through

voice” (137). Her insight into the flowers as figures of voice invites reconsideration of some

early descriptions of H.D.’s poetry as frigid: “the voice of “Sea Rose” is not static, frigid, or

“crystalline,” but rather harsh, marred, meager, risky, compelled, and compelling . . . . not divine

or transcendent, but sharply human, almost disintegrating while revealing itself under severe

constraints” (136). Gregory profitably connects the sea flowers to Jonathan Culler’s ideas about

the centrality of apostrophe and other “figures of voicing to lyric poetry, particularly his

assertion that apostrophizing is a vital way that lyric poets link themselves to a tradition.

The sea rose is a sign in terms of which a poetic voice presumes power and opens a

circuit with the reader, who is thus implicated in a transtemporal project—making the

rose out of language, interiorizing the rose in an allegory of desire, within this fiction

invoking the rose in a lineage of invocations: Yeats’ Rosicrucian rose, Browning’s rose

tree, Blake’s sick rose, Waller’s lovely rose, Meleager’s anthology/garland with Sappho’s

roses. (136)

Gregory’s interpretation suggests that the movement that distances the sea flowers from other

poetic flowers is at the same time a movement that binds them, “in a lineage.” The establishment

of difference is also an establishment of likeness. The flowers’ defiant rejection of convention

and celebration of their status as “misfit” or “outcast” (Morris, Friedman) has a powerful irony

then, because really each flower’s deviance from others only reinforces its membership in that

set: the distinction is a small, species-level, taxonomic one.

The Flowers of Meleager’s Garland

Though analogies between flowers and poetry predate them, the Hellenists, steeped in fascination with writing and texts, made much of the figure because of the affinity between plant parts and poetic writing materials. The conceptualization of poets as creators of floral arrangements—including gardens, garlands, bouquets, field guides, and taxonomies— was attractive to the archive-mad Hellenists, as it was to collage-making modernists millennia later: the emphasis is on the dimension of the poet’s role that involves arranging and cultivating what is already there. Meleager’s elaboration of this theme in his anthology shows, in Gutzwiller’s words, “the collaborative nature of epigram production, the difficulty of containing epigram creativity within fixed borders” (Poetic Garlands 280).

Meleager introduces his Garland with a prefatory poem, or prooemium, in which he takes the garlanding metaphor to its most extreme, emphasizing its figurality and playfully arguing for the superiority of written flowers to non-written ones. The majority of the prooemium consists of a list of the poets included in the Garland, each linked to a corresponding plant:

Many lilies of Anyte he inwove, and many of Moero, of Sappho few flowers, but they are

roses; narcissus, too, heavy with the clear song of Melanippides and a young branch of

the vine of Simonides; and therewith he wove in the sweetscented lovely iris of Nossis,

the wax for whose writing-tablets Love himself melted; and with it marjoram from

fragrant Rhianus, and Erinna's sweet crocus, maiden-hued, the hyacinth of Alcaeus, the

vocal poets' flower, and a dark-leaved branch of Samius' laurel. He wove in too the

luxuriant ivy-clusters of Leonidas and the sharp needles of Mnasalcas' pine; the deltoid

plane-leaves of the song of Pamphilus he plucked intangled with Pancrates' walnut

branches; and the graceful poplar leaves of Tymnes, the green serpolet of Nicias and the

spurge of Euphemus that grows on the sands; Damagetus, the dark violet, too, and the

sweet myrtle of Callimachus, ever full of harsh honey. . . (4.1)

Meleager provides contrapuntal vegetation for 47 epigrammatists, including “the still early white

violets of his own Muse” (Mackail 95). But the most noticeable aspect of the prooemium’s

garland is the sheer number of plants Meleager claims to inweave: a number that, as Gow and

Page point out, draws much attention to the fact that “garland” is a figure:

The association of flowers with poetry was already old . . . nor was the idea of weaving

the flowers of poesie into a garland new . . . To compose a garland, by implication indeed

of poems, but nominally of poets, is a further and perhaps not very wise extension of the

figure . . . . There was no reason to suppose [Meleager] was botanically minded . . .he

does not pause to consider that his flowers, fruits, and foliage are not all available at the

same time of year. Nor does it trouble that, if they were so, the monstrous garland which

he composes of them could be worn by neither [Meleager’s patron] Diocles...nor by

anybody else (2.593-4)

Far from troubling, we might imagine Meleager delighting that the non-written world could never imitate his garland. But the formidable Gow and Page are not alone among more-than- respectable scholars in finding the prooemium tedious and excessive, and for the same reason just as many find the Greek Anthology itself so1: they are absurdly voluminous and extremely repetitive, they play the same tricks over and over. Gow’s and Page’s point is that Diocles’

1Cornell Classics professor Hayden Pelliccia in a recent review: “It is not beyond human stamina to read through the Iliad’s 15,000 lines in one or two sittings, but how many six-line epigrams on fading courtesans can a normal person take? In making my way through [the] first volume I have found twenty to be my usual limit per session, and I do this for a living. Any more and the taste buds pall and the attention wanders” (Pelliccia).

inability to wear the garland parallels many readers’ inability to get through the lengthy prooemium and enormous quantity of epigrams they precede.

Meleager acknowledges that his poems are not for everybody, but in trying to specify who they are for, some ambiguities arise. The prooemium ends: “Now to my friends I bring this gift; but the sweet-worded garland of the Muses is common to all initiate” (Mackail 95). The initiate are lovers of epigram; people who play its games, who read it, write it, edit it, archive it, transmit it. But questions are raised by the juxtaposition of these clauses: how can Meleager give what is held in common? How can Meleager give what belongs to the Muses? Further, earlier in the prooemium the garland is not gifted to friends or initiates generally, but to Meleager’s patron

Diocles: “Dear muse, for whom bringest thou this gardenful of song? or who is he that fashioned the garland of poets? Meleager made it, and wrought out this gift as a remembrance for noble

Diocles” (Mackail 93). Was the garland given or made? What do we make of the “or,” unquestionable in the Greek, that links the first two questions? Are they distinct questions, or two ways of asking the same thing? As do the last lines, these first lines, while pretending to delineate authority, ownership, and intent as an introductory should, actually are making mischief and sowing ambiguities. The sequence of flowers, “by implication . . . poems, but nominally . . .poets,” radiates similar ambiguities about poetic creation, not only because it highlights the uncertain relationship between authors’ names and poems, but also because the apparently consistent formula of a poet’s name with a plant’s name is subverted by variations that slightly violate, amend, or supplement it. Such sequences meditate on ambiguities about poetic authority, and offer a way of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The prooemium’s word “initiates” is in Greek μύσταις [mystais], and referred originally to members of religious cults who had been initiated into those cults’ mysteries. With this word,

Meleager presents the Garland’s sequences of minute variations as meditative exercises of the

Alexandrian archetypical devout poet-scholar, who exercises the language as he exercises himself, and who is more concerned with poetry’s formal patterns and their variation than its representational efficacy. Meleager himself epitomizes this poet-scholar: not a well of original genius, but a bricoleur, adapter, and arranger, possessing a “skill at the art of variation which clearly bears a connection to his talents as the editor of an aesthetically arranged anthology” in which “epigrams by earlier poets are followed by variations of the same theme by Meleager”

(Gutzwiller, “Poetics of Editing” 176). Meleager combines “epigrammatic predecessors” and performs “self-variation,” presenting literary tradition, whose most obvious dimensions are diachronic and linear, as synchronic and as “hav[ing] a simultaneous existence and compos[ing] a simultaneous order.” Meleager gets initiated into the mysteries of epigram by collecting them, reading them, varying them, and hybridizing them.

H.D. alludes to the prooemium’s lengthy list of minutely-varied flowers in the Sea

Garden poem “Sea Gods,” which also suggests that its piling of flowers is the action of initiates, of an exclusive group with a special relationship to divinity. “Sea Gods” begins by recounting the attestation of an unnamed third-person plural that gods are lost and cannot be recovered; in the subsequent section, “we” attempt to conjure them anyway, by bringing them a panoply of violets:

But we bring violets,

great masses—single, sweet,

wood-violets, stream-violets,

violets from a wet marsh.

Violets in clumps from hills,

tufts with earth at the roots,

violets tugged from rocks,

blue violets, moss, cliff, river-violets.

Yellow violets’ gold,

burnt with a rare tint—

violets like red ash

among tufts of grass.

We bring deep-purple

bird-foot violets.

We bring the hyacinth-violet,

sweet, bare, chill to the touch—

and violets whiter than the in-rush

of your own white surf. (20-37)

Not only are violets the flowers that traditionally crown the Muses, but white violets are also the flowers Meleager associates with himself in the prooemium, and he presents them last, just as

H.D. does here. In enumerating the gifts and describing them appealingly, H.D.’s list follows a pattern set by archaic dedicatory epigram, in which one not only provides a verbal representation

of the gift, but also implies the gifts’ likeness or affinity to the god. Gestures like these are what lead Gregory to remark that H.D.’s apostrophic addresses do not signal “perfection and finality,” but “initation and progress” (136). Further, in suggesting that the gift is whiter than the white of the gods, H.D. is also employing an epigrammatic strategy, not of archaic dedicatory epigram, but of its later adaptation: amatory epigram. The importance of this hyperbolizing comparison will be elucidated in the following Garland sequence.

Garlands Within Garlands

I work with a sequence of amatory epigrams here, not only because that is where garland tropes are most abundant, but also to demonstrate that, contra Gregory, these epigrams influenced H.D.’s work in Sea Garden and not just the later works of the 1920s. The Hellenistic tradition of adaptation, including the adaptation of dedicatory formulae to erotic situations, exemplifies the practice of radical rearrangement that breaks down existing genre-boundaries.

Gutzwiller, who along with Alan Cameron has perhaps done the most work toward reconstructing Meleager’s original ordering, suggests that his amatory epigrams in the sequence

5.142-5.149 “were early works that planted the seed from which grew Meleager’s concept of the anthology as a garland of poetic blossoms; their creative use in the Garland sequence testifies to

Meleager’s skill at editing” (Poetic Garlands 286).

5.143 Meleager The flowers are fading that crown Heliodora's brow, but she glows brighter and crowns the wreath.

5.144 Meleager Already the white violet is in flower and narcissus that loves the rain, and the lilies that haunt the hillside, and already she is in bloom, Zenophila, love's darling, the sweet rose of Persuasion, flower of the flowers of spring. Why laugh ye joyously, ye meadows, vainglorious for your bright tresses? More to be preferred than all sweet-smelling posies is she.

5.145 Asclepiades Abide here, my garlands, where I hang ye by this door, nor shake off your leaves in haste, for I have watered you with my tears — rainy are the eyes of lovers. But when the door opens and ye see him, shed my rain on his head, that at least his fair hair may drink my tears.

5.146 Callimachus The Graces are four, for beside those three standeth a new-erected one, still dripping with scent, blessed Berenice, envied by all, and without whom not even the Graces are Graces.

5.147 Meleager I will plait in white violets and tender narcissus mid myrtle berries, I will plait laughing lilies too and sweet crocus and purple hyacinths and the roses that take joy in love, so that the wreath set on Heliodora's brow, Heliodora with the scented curls, may scatter flowers on her lovely hair.

5.148 Meleager I foretell that one day in story sweet-spoken Heliodora will surpass by her graces the Graces themselves.

Table 1.1

In this sequence, Meleager weaves himself into the tradition of literary epigram by blending two tropes from two key predecessor epigrams, each by a major poet who lived about two centuries before him. These two antecedent epigrams are in different sub-traditions by most reckonings—Callimachus’ in the line of public, dedicatory epigrams on statues, a general audience, and Asclepiades’ in the amatory-sympotic line. Their genetic differences are marked: the smooth impersonal authority of 5.146; the elaborate despair of 5.145. But, Meleager finds affinities. This sequence binds 5.145 and 5.146 through exploiting their shared metalinguistic meanings (i.e., they are both really about how good a poet the epigrammatist is) and the shared diffusion imagery that gets reappropriated on that metalingual level. Putting them together,

Meleager emphasizes these shared features and also teaches us how to read the poems he has woven alongside them.

Meleager reads in Asclepiades’ apostrophe to garlands an invitation to understand the garland as a poetic text. The speaker in 5.145 has wept into some garlands and hung them above his lover’s door, hoping that when the lover walks under, tears will “rain” onto his head. This elaborate conceit is in keeping with the silliness of paraclausithyra, poems that beseech or lament, in vain, outside the beloved’s closed door. The garland here behaves in some respects as a poetic text—a self-replacement wrought by the author and infused with his passion, which it can transmit in the author’s absence. 5.145 was not included in the sequence for its setting outside a closed door or its presentation of tears as rain, neither of which recur; its importance here is its use of amatory forms/tropes to make metapoetic claims, its use of the garlands to represent poems. Meleager varies this by addressing meadows in 5.144, and creating clear parallels between garland-making and textual creation in both 5.144 and 5.147. Meleager’s “so that the wreath . . . may scatter” image is a variation of Asclepiades’ weeping garlands.

Gow and Page, following the lead of earlier scholars, call 5.146’s placement in Book 5 an error: some errant copyist mislaid it among the amatory flower epigrams, when it clearly belongs in Book 9 among epigrams on statues (2.171). But other scholars have challenged this2, and

Gutzwiller, though she does not directly mention 5.146, points out a pattern evident in neighboring epigrams regarding the use of the word charis and its various declensions, that also applies to 5.146:

the balancing theme of the beloved’s grace surpassing the Graces themselves (Χάριτας

χάρισιν [Charitas charisin], 5.148; Χάριν ἐν χάριτι [Charin en chariti], 5.149) [is] a

theme anticipated already in 5.140 (Χάριτες, χάριτας [Charites, charitas]). Meleager’s

emphasis on χάρις [charis], the quality of grace or charm, assumes a greater significance

when we remember that his own prose works...were entitled the Charites…, a title with

which he plays in his self-epitaphs….; to say that the graceful Heliodora conquers the

Graces suggests, programmatically, that Meleager’s erotic epigrams. . . outshine his

earlier work. (286, my transliterations)

Poem 5.146 ends with the same kind of charites stutter that Gutzwiller identifies in 5.140, 5.148 and 5.149, and if we look closely we can see other good reasons to imagine Meleager intentionally placed 5.146 in this neighborhood even though its status as amatory is debatable:

Callimachus makes meta-textual suggestions about relationships between poetic texts in a given poetic lineage. Callimachus’ masterful epigram suggests Berenice comes as both a new creation and as a revelation about those who already occupied the same tradition or category (of charis). Berenice has a new beauty that deepens and revives the old order, rather than replacing

2 See especially Cameron 29-30 and Petrovic and Petrovic, Stop and Smell the Statues.

it. The poem implies that the sequence of four makes visible some pattern that the sequence of

three doesn’t yield, some deeper understanding of charis made possible by the manifestation of

an unexpected aspect of it. Poem 5.146’s figure is a metaphor about the place of Callimachus’

particular work within a tradition, as Gutzwiller suggests Meleager’s is about his, especially

when woven into this sequence.

In weaving these epigrams together, Meleager has created not only new poems, but a

larger-scale new entity as well—not just in creating book 5 and not just by making sequences of

similars, but by using ring composition to present these 6 as one. If we were presented with only

5.143 and 5.148, we would notice their similarity because they both present a beautiful

comparator for Heliodora only to have her exceed it. But we would not notice the ring-

composition symmetry of the sequence, which could fold between Asclepiades’ 5.145 and

Callimachus’ 5.146 to have on each side one antecedent epigram, a Meleager “garland” epigram

that includes white violets, narcissus, and lilies, and a Meleagrian exceeding-the-comparator

epigram. 5.144 and 5.147, like 5.145, use the trope of garlands as poems; 5.143 and 5.148 use

Callimachus’ trope of being more like the thing than the thing itself. These poems, blatantly

variations of each other, function as passageways, radiations, from that hybridizing nexus, that

place of transference, that Meleager created in weaving together Asclepiades’ weepy

paraclausithyron with the tidy luxury of Callimachus’ Berenice poem. We are encouraged to

seek metalinguistic interpretations of Meleager’s epigrams, because they are presented as

radiating from two metalinguistic epigrams. The radiation is charis.

Charis

The prevalence of charis in the above sequence is characteristic of not just Hellenistic

epigram, but of Ancient Greek culture more broadly, and especially in the archaic days of

epigram’s nascence:

No serious reader of early Greek poetry can avoid the fact that charis dominates the

literary portrayal of life during the archaic age. . . .charis flickered when beautiful women

sparkled; soldiers brought charis to their commanders on the battlefield or expected to

win it when they fought well; charis graced appropriate behavior and speech and was a

distinguishing mark of nobility; it was at the center of the feast; in the verses of the love

poets it sat upon the hair or the eyes of the beloved. . . . Indeed, it would seem that for the

early Greeks charis was present at all the high moments of life. (MacLachlan 3-4)

It would therefore be hard to overstate the importance of charis, which Aristotle defined as “a favour demanding another favour, beauty calling for more beauty” (Pontani 24) and Bonnie

MacLachlan as a “mutually shared pleasure that breaks down the barriers of the self” (14). It can

be translated as “grace,” “charm,” “gratitude,” “favor,” or “goodwill,” and was embodied by the

entities commonly referred to in English as “the Graces,” who were celebrated as bringers of

increase, of appreciation of all kinds. Common to most definitions and critical discussions of the

term are its connotations of increase and reciprocity, qualities that characterize its relationship to

inscribed archaic dedicatory epigram and Hellenistic literary epigram alike.

According to Joseph W. Day in Archaic Greek Epigram and Dedication:

Representation and Reperformance (2010), archaic dedicatory epigram embodies the exchange

of charis enacted by the original event of offering, allowing that occasion to be perpetuated:

The emergence of ritual-like effects in an encounter would thus slide into a reenactment

of the original rite of dedicating, successfully guided by an epigram that frames

encounters as ritual performances and as reperformances. . . . From the perspective of

effects and reception, then, a dedication inscribed with an epigram could memorialize the

act of dedicating by generating its perpetual reperformance. (16)

The words accompanying the gift create the rhetorical effect of a “now [that] is repeatable”

(232). As such this “repeatable now” seems to be outside of normal time, a transtemporal now that can be re-entered, confounding linear temporal models. Day’s argument suggests that a special pleasure economy is created by the mechanism of which the epigram is one part: the gift pleases the god; the giver hopes to be rewarded by a returning beneficence; the epigram allows this pleasure circuit to be transmissible to future readers (240). The cycle of goodwill or charis is supposed to

generate between giver and receiver, not a temporary commercial relationship dismissed

when the transaction is finished, but a lasting one characterized by gratitude and

obligation to be sure but also by mutual enjoyment, esteem, and friendship. Charis

encoded these affective motivations and results, expressing the emotional and aesthetic

means by which gifts constructed and symbolized relationships. (241)

Just as the Hellenistic poets translated the Muse from an archaic divinity into the representation of the written literary tradition, so did they, in inheriting the archaic dedicatory formula, transform charis from a byproduct of social and religious relationships into a byproduct of literary relationships. As seen in the Garland sequence, charis functions on one level as poetic inspiration or enthusiasm, “dripping,” “glowing,” or elsewise emanating from the poem-like woman or flower.

The gods wanted gifts that were like them, and, in response to their receipt, would dole out like gifts: fertility gods, for example, are given first-fruits and respond by making possible a

good harvest. Likeness is appreciated and brings more like goods to be appreciated, in the

manner that texts enter traditions by giving back what they found there, yet also by adding more.

Gods and lovers like gifts that are like them, gifts that reflect their goodness back to themselves,

gifts whose characteristics are like their own. Swords are given to Ares, mirrors to Aphrodite,

and flowers to lovers. Charis seems to be the appreciation of these gifts—-appreciation with all

its sense of increase. Charis may have originally emanated from reciprocal relationships between

humans and gods, and then later between citizens of a polis, but in Hellenistic literary epigram, it

is between poems and/or poets; Aristotle’s definition of “beauty calling for more beauty” still

works, but here it takes the form of texts calling for more texts. Playing likenesses off each other

is how poetry moves, and from the play of substitutions and equivalences arises the less-tangible elements of poetic transmission or inheritances: inspiration, enthusiasm, motivating pleasure, intellectual stimulation.

The relationship signaled by charis is sustained from archaic times to Hellenistic, such that descriptions from MacLachlan’s study of archaic charis still apply: “charis designates the process [of exchange] and is applied both to the beautiful object that arouses a response, and to the response itself”; “Charis is not passive but a uis laetificatrix (a pleasure-bringing power)”

(8). While H.D. does not seem to have formed a relationship to this word, she intuited and put to use the relationship it encodes, and developed her own version of it, symbolized in the brightness and fragrance of her sea flowers. This relationship, of reciprocity plus increase, is closely allied with what I have called, in Meleager and Callimachus, the trope of exceeding the comparator: the gesture that at once asserts identity with the tradition and, paradoxically, a distinction and

“pleasure-bringing power” that surpasses it. The mingling, pleasure-bringing permeability of poetic or literary charis arises, in the narrowest view, from the establishment and perpetuation of

a relationship (between a poem and other poems,) that both establishes likeness and pretends to

surpass it: to be more like the comparator than the comparator is like itself; to be more beautiful

than the standard-setting beauty. This relationship is then the smallest unit in larger scale charis-

generating arrangements like sequences, anthologies, canons.

The Sea Flower Poems

Sea Garden’s arrangements—its poems, sets of poems, and the set of poems that it is— attempt to generate something very similar to charis, which H.D. presents through tropes of scattering and diffusion (of scent, light, petal-flecks, etc). For all their touted crystallinity and hardness, her flowers/poems assert themselves as sites of dissemination. What most strongly signals the allegiance of both H.D.’s sea flowers’ and 5.142-5.148 to non-linear models of literary inheritance is their shared emphasis on the inherently non-linear emanations of scent and light (brightness), an important extension of the poetry-as-flowers trope. Berenice is described by

Callimachus as “dripping with scent,” and scent plays an important role in the comparison between flowers and lovers in 5.144 and 5.147. Scent testifies to the superiority of most of the sea flowers (only “Sea Lily” does not explicitly mention scent,) most notably in “Sea Rose” and

“Sea Poppies.”

“Sea Rose” “Sea Poppies”

Rose, harsh rose, Amber husk

marred and with stint of petals, fluted with gold,

meagre flower, thin, fruit on the sand

sparse of leaf, marked with a rich grain,

more precious treasure

than a wet rose spilled near the shrub-pines

single on a stem— to bleach on the boulders:

you are caught in the drift.

your stalk has caught root

Stunted, with small leaf, among wet pebbles

you are flung on the sand, and drift flung by the sea

you are lifted and grated shells

in the crisp sand and split conch-shells.

that drives in the wind.

Beautiful, wide-spread,

Can the spice-rose fire upon leaf,

drip such acrid fragrance what meadow yields

hardened in a leaf? so fragrant a leaf

as your bright leaf?

Table 1.2

Its word repetitions make Sea Garden’s vocabulary seem as if it were also dispersing, like the sea flowers. “Sea Poppies” particularly flaunts its repetitions, cramming “leaf” three times into its final stanza and rhyming “shells” with “conch-shells” in consecutive lines. “Sea

Rose” also has, though they are less concentratedly arranged, three lines that end with “leaf,” and rhymes “sand” with “sand” in the third stanza. While within the individual poems these repetitions sometimes seem like ruptures—stutters or glitches— because they are scattered across poems, they begin to seem like ruptures that bind, breaking down individual boundaries for the sake of collective unity. The repetitions make the words seem like particles of the same substance diffused throughout the poem, flaunting their iterativity.

The poems are so similar that they can be simultaneously described with some precision.

Both pile appositives like a field guide—to get the image clear, to achieve recognition—until the eighth line, when the second-person pronoun appears, revealing that a speaker is addressing the flower directly, offering it a flattering description of itself, common gift to god or lover. Following this device is a description of the addressee’s tenuous seaside grip (employing terms that emphasize its vulnerability, including “drift,” “caught,” “flung”), and then finally the poem ends in a rhetorical question regarding fragrance and leaves. We recognize in the ultimate stanzas, after the amatory epigram sequence, the trope of charis, of exceeding the comparator, of reciprocity plus increase, and see that here, too, we might take that trope to apply to the poem as well as the flower.

For the rose, scent is synaesthetically bound up with sight, because it is not certain that

“fragrance / hardened in a leaf” is still apprehended as scent. Nonetheless, this stanza accords well with Morris’ characterization of “Sea Rose” as “releas[ing] an energy inimical to order” as it presents fragrance as a highly mutable, ethereal substance that can also take solid or liquid

form. In representing the petal (poem) as “fragrance”—something amorphous that mingles,

permeates, is diffused— that has “hardened”—making it the opposite of amorphous—”Sea

Rose” aims to create a sense of “‘repeatable evanescence’, between the twin negative

possibilities of being forgotten and becoming petrified or fixed” (Boyson 112-113). According

to John Wilkinson,

[w]hat a lyric poet seeks to contrive is repeatable evanescence. . . . the paradoxical effect

of reconciling a reader to contingency, to the evanescent, time and again. To make an

event recur, not as a memorial of a moment past, a song dying, a day fading, a lover

gone, but to recur in its particularity. (26)

Wilkinson’s term is an important redescription of what has previously been called “lyric time”

and “the lyric present,” and is especially suited to reading H.D.’s insistently evanescent flowers3.

While the previous insights help us describe the sea-flower poems’ lyric attempts to suspend a

moment, as will be seen below, Wilkinson’s helps us translate the flowers’ paradoxical blend of

hard/metallic and diffuse/ethereal imagery into its metapoetic analog: the poems try to exist in

between ungraspable abstraction and impenetrable opacity, because this is the hallmark of the

3 Sharon Cameron identifies in Lyric Time (1979) as an essential feature of the lyric its

attempt to ““present sequence as if it were a unity” (241), so that in much lyric poetry

“movement is not consecutive but is rather heaped or layered” (240-1). More recently, in his

Theory of the Lyric (2015), Jonathan Culler has argued that “the iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’ of lyric articulation” is “the fundamental characteristic of the lyric” (226).

tradition to which they seek entry. His description also helps us more clearly link Day’s

repeatable now of epigram with the lyric now: both seek not just to remember a moment, but to

re-experience it.

The sea flowers’ charis is derived from the relationship that appears in one sense as

between the addressed flower and its address; the addressing function’s description concentrates

attention on the flower and its deviant beauty; simultaneously, the poet’s visionary power is

asserted. There’s a sort of recognition relationship between flower and addresser; it is a

relationship of mutual appreciation, in the respect that the value of both entities is appreciated; it

is this moment in which poem and flower are at the ephemeral height of their symmetrical

aesthetic power, that the poem seeks to make repeatable. If, pressing on our flower-poem

analogy, we take the relationship encoded in the poem to be between the poet and her poem,

such that she offers her own shattered lineation and lexical drifting, it is still the gift-exchange

relationship of reciprocity and increase.4 In this arrangement-based poetics, it is the ratio, and not

4Inevitable connections have been made between the charis-soaked gift-exchange economy of archaic and classical Greece and Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don. Adalaide Morris argues that H.D. and Marcel Mauss were peas in a pod in preferring “gift economies” to “market economies”: “. . . the bonds a gift economy sustains are the opposite of the calculation and competitiveness that leads to war. As [H.D. and Mauss] understood it, gift exchange moves from reverence towards abundance and alliance, while market exchange moves from exploitation toward scarcity and conflict” (131). Morris pays special attention to hau, a concept whose likeness to charis is evident in her description of it “Marshall Sahlins identifies Mauss’s master concept as “the indigenous Maori idea hau, introduced . . . as ‘the spirit of things and in

the elements on either side of the colon, that is preserved. Even if we choose to understand the sea flowers not as analogous to H.D.’s original work but instead to ancient poems of, say,

Sappho, which are easily apprehended as “shattered” and liminal, the relationship of mutual, appreciating exchange still drives the poems.

The overdetermined liminality or evanescence of the sea flowers is most striking in “Sea

Lily” and “Sea Violet.” These poems each try to make repeatable a very specific moment, presented in the final stanza of each: the lily uplifted by the wind, the violet “catch[ing] the light.”

“Sea Lily” “Sea Violet”

Reed, The white violet

slashed and torn is scented on its stalk,

but doubly rich— the sea-violet

such great heads as yours fragile as agate,

drift upon temple-steps, lies fronting all the wind

but you are shattered among the torn shells

in the wind. on the sand-bank.

particular of the forest and the game it contains’”. . . For Mauss, the hau is the god in the goods.

It is alive and active, a part of the donor that travels along with the thing given and eventually draws the gift or its equivalent back towards its source.” Morris describes hau as increase; it is what “binds the material, spiritual, and social realms that market economies compartmentalize and set in opposition” (130).

Myrtle-bark The greater blue violets

is flecked from you, flutter on the hill,

scales are dashed but who would change for these

from your stem, who would change for these

sand cuts your petal, one root of the white sort?

furrows it with hard edge,

like flint Violet

on a bright stone. your grasp is frail

on the edge of the sand-hill,

Yet though the whole wind but you catch the light—

slash at your bark, frost, a star edges with its fire.

you are lifted up,

aye—though it hiss

to cover you with froth.

Table 1.3

The focus on particularity—the confrontation between individual and collective—is sharpest in

these two poems: the contrast between the “one root” of the sea violet and the group of violets on

the hill, or between “great heads” of temple lilies and the singular sea lily, and the lone-ness of the sea flower, poised against “all the wind” or “the whole wind.” Perhaps that is what attracts other affinities; even more than the rose and poppies do the violet and lily threaten metamorphosis. The mutability of matter in this liminal zone is [made powerful by] the careful, and startling, arrangement of images. “Fragile as agate” and “sand cuts your petal” “like flint on

a bright stone” are images that, like “fragrance / hardened in a leaf,” suggest paradox or at least disequilibrium. Agate is not particularly fragile; using it to describe the fragility of a violet feels backward. A similar strangeness emanates from “torn shells”; we are in a world where petals shatter but shells tear. In “Sea Iris,” too, there is “a petal like a shell,” and the flower begins to take on boat-like qualities as in “Sea Violet.”

“Sea Iris”

I II

Weed, moss-weed, Do the murex-fishers

root tangled in sand, drench you as they pass?

sea-iris, brittle flower, Do your roots drag up colour

one petal like a shell from the sand?

is broken, Have they slipped gold under you—

and you print a shadow rivets of gold?

like a thin twig.

Band of iris-flowers

Fortunate one, above the waves,

scented and stinging, you are painted blue,

rigid myrrh-bud, painted like a fresh prow

camphor-flower, stained among the salt weeds.

sweet and salt—you are wind

in our nostrils.

Table 1.4

Despite the above-mentioned similarities, the shared emphasis on scent and color, and the

apostrophizing of the flower, though, “Sea Iris” is the most aberrant sea flower in the set. The

division of the poem into sections is unique to it, as is the first-person plural (“in our nostrils”).

The first section addresses a single iris (“Fortunate one”), but the second section speaks to a

“band of iris-flowers,” a significant inconsistency not seen elsewhere in the sea flower set. There

are stanzas composed of a single question in three of the other four sea-flower poems, but the three-question stanza in “Sea Iris” has a different character. Each of those were comparative (“is there any regular flower so good as this sea flower?”) and apparently rhetorical (implying that there isn’t). The questions in “Sea Rose” and “Sea Violet” aren’t even necessarily addressed to the flower. In contrast, the questions addressed to the sea iris seem relatively urgent and earnest.

The deviances of “Sea Iris”, considerably more pronounced than the exclusivities of the other sea flowers, create a rupture in the set, but do so in order to reach outside of Sea Garden more explicitly than the other sea-flower poems do. The break is a break that binds, like an inserted quotation, and through itself links the other poems to an image of Robert Browning’s, from “Popularity” (suggested by Gregory 236), which itself ends in interrogatives and is broken up into sections, and in which the blue dye of murex is likened to pure essence of poetry and is brought up from the deep by “true” poets like Keats, but then also used by poetasters:

Hobbs hints blue, —-Straight he turtle eats:

Nobbs prints blue, —-claret crowns his cup:

Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats, —-

Both gorge. Who fished the murex up?

What porridge had John Keats? (canto 13)

Linking Browning’s poem about the origins, attribution, and transmission of poetry-stuffs to

Hellenistic epigrammatists, who explore the same questions, H.D. creates a connection between them based on their joint inquiry into the origin of the work of art. This model of poetic inspiration as a dye from a sea creature brought up and then spread around dissemination-style, refusing to demarcate clean lines of origin, reinforces and challenges the parameters of the sea flower group. On the one hand, it supports our contention that the sea-flower poems are really about poetry, and it presents poetic inspiration or enthusiasm as fluid and permeating. On the other hand, these poetic emanations do not come from flowers, and the re-appropriability of the dye is presented as ambivalent as best. The reference to “Popularity” strengthens and complexifies “Sea Iris” and the other sea-flower poems, suggesting new connections (e.g., is the final image of “Sea Violet,” where the flower is edged in brightness like a star, related to the

“true poet” of “Popularity,” who is told “when afar / You rise, remember one man saw you, /

Knew you, and named a star!”?). At the same time, it shows how readily other analogies might be substituted for the floral ones. By inserting the Browning allusion into the final sea flower poem, H.D. resists closing the set. Like Meleager, H.D. creates poetic arrangements larger than the poem but smaller than the book, entities whose unity is clearly contingent and not necessary or permanent. Such arrangements encourage seeing large bodies of written poems (anthologies, libraries, archives, databases, traditions, canons) and the interrelationships within them as never fixed and always susceptible to revision. A new addition to the corpus that places itself within a new configuration of older poems changes the way we read those older poems, altering their meaning, just as, in an individual poem, there is always the possibility that the sense and syntax of one line will be altered by what happens after the line break.

Writtenness, Metastrophic Intent, and The End of the Poem

The claim that the essence of poetry lies in the possibility of enjambment (considered broadly) is elaborated by Giorgio Agamben in The End of the Poem. Noting that enjambment occurs when a metrical line ends before the line of thought does, Agamben cites Paul Valery’s assertion that the poetry is marked by “a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.” While language seems often like a unity of sound and sense, in a poem this interplay is a divided unity, a suspended moment of indecision. In this scheme of things, though, the last line of the poem presents a problem, because there is no possibility of enjambment:

As if the poem as a formal structure would not and could not end, as if the possibility of

the end were radically withdrawn from it, since the end would imply a poetic

impossibility: the exact coincidence of sound and sense. At the point in which sound is

about to be ruined in the abyss of sense, the poem looks for shelter in suspending its own

end in a declaration, so to speak, of the state of poetic emergency. (113)

Agamben implies that the end of the poem is a crisis point in which the poem will try to find a way to avoid ending, either by pointing back into itself or by pointing outward to another text, a neighboring text. The end of the poem finds a way to suggest that the tension and opposition between sound and sense is still playing out, and that neither the poem’s sounds nor its meanings are fixed. This is exactly the ethos at play in the Anthology; no epigram is ever closed or not inviting variation. And if we consider the endings of the sea-flower poems, we will see them too linking outward and inward. Here are the five final stanzas, side by side for comparison.

(“Sea (“Sea Lily”) (“Sea (“Sea (“Sea Iris”) Rose”) Poppies”) Violet”)

Yet though Band of iris- Can the the whole wind Beautiful, Violet flowers spice-rose slash at your wide-spread, your grasp above the drip bark, fire upon is frail waves, such acrid you are leaf, on the edge you are fragrance lifted up, what of the sand-hill, painted blue, hardene aye—though meadow yields but you painted like a d in a leaf? it hiss so fragrant catch the light— fresh prow to cover you a leaf frost, a star stained among with froth. as your edges with its fire. the salt weeds. bright leaf?

Table 1.5

The three consecutive unstressed syllables of “hardened in a leaf” seem an isolated, unremarkable incident in the last line of “Sea Rose,” until we find the same fat choriamb or pyrrhic substitution in the final stanza of three of the other four sea-flower poems, and then notice it occurring at other climaxes in Sea Garden, like a skipped heartbeat (e.g., in the important penultimate line of the violet sequence in “Sea Gods”: “whiter than the in-rush”).

Through such resonances across the poems, we understand the sea flower set as edifying itself, each linking to the other and announcing as well their entrance into the tradition of lyric game- play, despite their individual emphasis on each sea flower’s erosive break from the tradition. We also note that two of the poems end in questions, which might also be considered a means to avoid ending.

And, as Agamben points out, further demonstrating the relevance of his discussion to

Hellenistic epigram, this kind of metapoetic resonance is most relevant to written poetry. One of his examples of poets to whose poem writtenness is essential is Arnaut Daniel, Pound’s beloved twelfth-century troubadour. Underscoring the facility with which written texts can be used to construct different patterns at different scales, Agamben speaks of “metastrophic intent” at play in Daniel. This poetic technique consists of creating a verse or group of lines or words that does

not fit with the formal structure of the stanza or strophe that contains it, but that does “bind

itself” or correspond to lines or line groups in other strophes, creating a pattern more readily

available to a reader who can see that metastrophic intent than it would be to a listener.

At the point where the flat correspondence between metrical phrase and melodic phrase is

broken, there arises a new and more complex correspondence in which the unrelated

verse, binding itself to its counterpart in the following strophe, plays out a superior, and

so to speak, silent score. The change of the structure of the song in the direction of

continuous ode and antimelodic instrumentation . . . is the prelude to a radical crisis in the

relation between text and its oral performance. . . what is at stake is the emancipation of

the poetic text not only from song but from oral performance in general. “The page,”

Mallarme will write, “taken as a unity, as is elsewhere the verse of the perfect line.” In

other words: poetry as something essentially graphic. (33)

Agamben uses the word “antimelodic” to indicate a mode of composing and reading poetic texts

in which one pays attention not just as if to one “linear succession of musical tones that the

listener perceives as a single entity” (“Melody”). Rather, more complex unities are sought.

Agamben gives the example of the sestina, “that rigorous genre” which Daniel invented. One could not appreciate a sestina’s pattern through reading just one stanza. The concept of metastrophic intent can be applied more broadly, to encompass the situation in which poems create patterns that can only be grasped by looking at the whole sequence, as in the case of the sea-flower poems. The reader, rather than treating each poem individually as a subjectivity he can inhabit like a character in a drama, inhabits instead a more editorial role, taking pleasure not as much in empathizing with a speaker or character, but more in creation and recognition of patterns; pleasure in what Amittai Aviram calls “the game of tension and paradox between the

sense and the sound that both expresses the sense and distracts us from it . . . .the musical game

[lyric poetry] plays, not only in its metrical rhythms, but in its ordering, forms, and arrangements” (“Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity”); a charis-generating pleasure.

In The Well-Read Muse, Peter Bing argues that, in the shift from Hellenic to Hellenistic, the oft-invoked Muse changed from a divinity into the proper name of the written tradition, embodied by the new Hellenistic libraries, the establishment of which was the “crucial push” in

“dislodging performance as the primary reality of verse” (45). Bing’s 1997 “Ergänzungsspiel in the Epigrams of Callimachus” introduced the influential term Ergänzungsspiel, or game of supplementation or completion: “Hellenistic epigram was often deliberately severed from its object or monument, and set in the as yet uncharted territory of the book. Here poets began to exploit, and play with, [the] process of supplementation in a deliberate and artful way”

(“Callimachus” 116). Part of the duty and pleasure of the poet and reader is to supplement, to create something that substitutes for the object or memorial. The supplemented entity must necessarily be a written one. Ergänzungsspiel is treating any written text as incomplete or otherwise in need of supplementation. This is how Alexandrian syncretism approaches tradition.

It’s taking what one comes across (texts of the traditions) as shards, not for the sake of reconstituting the lost whole of an original and ancient vase, but as pretext for one’s own ceramics. The Ergänzungsspiel attitude also points up, once more, the similarity between

Alexandrian practices and a certain strain of Modernist ones: for practitioners of

Ergänzungsspiel, everything is conceived of as a fragment, both new creations and existing ones.

The End of the Chapter

H.D.’s essay “The Wise Sappho,” written between 1916 and 1918, begins with reference to Meleager’s prooemium’s depiction of Sappho’s poems as “few, but all roses”:

“Little, but all roses” is the dictate of the Alexandrine poet, yet I am inclined to disagree.

I would not bring roses, nor yet the great shaft of scarlet lilies. I would bring orange

blossoms, implacable flowerings made to seduce the sense when every other means has

failed, poignard that glints, fresh sharpened steel: after the red heart, red lilies,

impassioned roses are dead. (57)

With these words, H.D. names Meleager, as much as Sappho, her literary ancestor, because,

while, staying within Meleager’s poet-analogizing framework, she challenges his choices and his vision. This move is analogous to her creation of a floral arrangement that both rivals and channels his own, and in which the diffusive movements of scent and light are always present, both creating the conditions for and emanating from the arrangement or re-arrangement.

Fittingly, after meditating at length on Sappho and her appropriate analogs, she reverses herself and decides that Meleager is half-right:

Little—not little—but all, all roses! So at the last, we are forced to accept the often

quoted tribute of Meleager, late Alexandrian, half Jew, half Grecian poet. . . . So Sappho

must live, roses, but many roses, for tradition has set flower upon flower about her name

and would continue to do so though her last line were lost. (68-9).

The floral analogy gains a funereal connotation in these lines, which imagine Sappho’s name as a tomb upon which poems inspired by her pile up. This other connection between epigram and lyric—a shared fascination with death— will be explored in the next chapter, in which H.D.’s

“Shrine (She Watches Over the Sea)” is read as an allegory of its reception of poem 9.144, by the female epigrammatist Anyte.

CHAPTER TWO: A VOYAGE

Argument

Sea Garden’s “The Shrine (She Watches Over the Sea)” takes its subtitle from J.W.

Mackail’s title for a mid-third-century BCE epigram by Anyte, 9.144 in the Greek

Anthology. But no attempt has been made yet to read “The Shrine” in close relation to 9.144.

“The Shrine” is not a translation, but it enacts a process of reception in which translation plays a

prominent role. This chapter reads “The Shrine” as an allegory of reading, translating, and

writing—all in response to Anyte’s poem.

Anyte’s 9.144 is classified as “declamatory” in the Loeb edition; it declaims a precinct as

Aphrodite’s (“the Cyprian” is Aphrodite) and asserts the goddess’ protection of sailors on the seas she overlooks from a cliffside shrine:

This is the Cyprian’s ground, since it was her pleasure ever to look from land on the

shining sea, that she may give fulfillment of their voyage to sailors; and around the deep

trembles, gazing on her bright image. (trans. Mackail)

We see encoded here the charis-driven world of reciprocity and increase characteristic of archaic epigram. In a very different, twentieth-century world, H.D.’s “The Shrine” disarticulates the unintelligible, archaic Aphrodite, initially doubting her usefulness and presence, then divesting her of archaism and rearticulating her as a still-relevant addressee. H.D.’s dis- and re-articulation is not just the transformation of an obsolete god into a living one, but also the poetic resurrection and re-visioning of Anyte and of Hellenistic Greek, both of whom/which could as readily as

Aphrodite be its addressee.

“The Shrine” uses violent imagery like the sea-flower poems but, unlike them, its violent imagery involves bodies, with “sparks that unknot the flesh” (58) as “The Shrine” speakers exchange their bodies for an ecstatic vision. They trade their embodiedness for the god’s, who appears in the last stanza with eyes and hands, leaning forward to welcome the crew members, who have reached the coast after a violent, sublime incident of bone-splitting and flesh- unknitting. These bodies are wrecked like ships and no longer needed; they are broken vessels, the spirits having reached ecstatic shore. The choral “we” that seeks the god must experience violent dismemberment and be reborn in order to meet her. The progression of the poem suggests that her life requires their own, in the way that, in order to speak, a piece of writing requires the reader to silence herself. As an allegory of reception or translation, “The Shrine” suggests similar transferability of vital force, but it is the body of the original text, Anyte’s, 9.144, that must be broken up and reconstituted afresh. Practicing a poetics influenced by the Anthology and the act of translation, “The Shrine” conflates voices, selves, bodies, and texts by implying their exchangeability, suggesting a common animating force, a poetic vitality that overspills the borders of its circuits of exchange, gets bent, scattered, and redirected. Whether we consider the speaker invoking the god or the living poet invoking the long dead one, the circuit of exchange between the two is anything but closed. “The Shrine” lives in this overspill, not contained by the definitions “translation,” “lyric,” or “theophanic,” but partaking of them while hovering just outside. Considering “The Shrine” a reception or “transcreation,” rather than a translation, of

9.144, I read its elements and design as addressing the same challenges as those direct translators face. H.D.’s translation-alternative is a manifestation of disruptive syncretism: it does not intend to replace translations, but to go alongside them, as a variation and elaboration that is a different way of bringing ancient Greek into modern English.

Imagism, Resurrection, and the Translation of Classical Texts

The Imagist moment, in 1910s London, centered on a group whose poetics was heavily

influenced by its translation practices; nearly every member undertook translation projects. A

number of the group’s high-profile members—including Ezra Pound, H.D., and Richard

Aldington—translated ancient Greek. Anthology poems were among the texts translated, especially by H.D. and Aldington. Both Pound and Aldington published translations of epigrams, and Jeanne Heuving has suggested that Pound’s Imagist doctrines were influenced by Mackail’s introduction to his selection from the Anthology (54). Caroline Zilboorg draws a connection between the Anthology and H.D.’s and Aldington’s Poets’ Translation Series, which ran to six installments in 1915-1916, until the war got in the way. In a tradition-defining collaboration like

the Anthology itself, “the Poets’ Translation Series was a collection of works, each translated

poetically by different writers, which . . . form an enduring whole representative of the literary

values of the individual translators and of the editor” (70). The first installment in the series was

Aldington’s translations of Anyte (75).

Zilboorg’s account of the Poets’ Translation Series emphasizes the degree to which

modernist overhaul of the previous century’s poetics was entangled with translation:

Aldington and H.D. were both writing sonnets in H.D.'s diary during June of 1912, but by

August or September, by the time of their writing the “imagiste” poems that so surprised

Pound, both had come to free verse, to poems in open form which were on the one hand

translations, versions of the Greek in literal though poetic English (as opposed to

Anglicized nineteenth-century rhymed and metric versions), and on the other hand

modern poems revolutionary in overturning Victorian and Georgian conventions both for

poetry and translation (70)

For the Imagist circle in London in the 1910s, part of the cultural work of poetry was the creation and perpetuation of its own discourse community by initiating members into its reception practices, including practices of translation.

Pound, too, helped forge modernist style by reimagining translation. In The Pound Era,

Hugh Kenner recounts an episode centered on Pound’s translation of a certain Sapphic fragment:

.P ‘ A[ . . .

ΔHPAT .[ . . .

ΓOΓ ‘ ΓΥΛA .[ . . .

. . . plus the beginnings of a dozen more lines: very possibly . . . the first aorist of the verb

to raise (conjecturing ήρ’ α), and a word unknown, and the name of a girl of Sappho’s. Or

you can remember from Alecaeus and Ibycus ήρ’, the contraction for springtime, and

derive the unknown word from [deros], too long, and write

Spring ......

Too long ......

Gongula ......

heading the little witticism “Papyrus” and printing it in a book of poems called Lustra as

an exemplum for resurrection-men. And wait decades from someone to unriddle it. (6)

“Papyrus,” published in the same collection as Pound’s own translation of Anyte’s 9.144, exemplifies Imagist hallmarks of concision and Hellenism, and here exemplifies Pound’s revitalizing style of translation (which is contrasted with the bloodless yet overwrought takes of

Sophists on the same Sapphic fragment). In asserting the knowledge of and ostensible ability to

recall classical sources required to render the first line “Spring,” and in emphasizing how long it

took for someone to connect “Papyrus” to the Sapphic fragment, which in turn emphasizes its

address to a group of elites (“resurrection-men”), Kenner’s description brings out how fully the

group of modernist poets surrounding Pound parallels that of the Hellenistic poets associated

with the Library of Alexandria: a circle of writers and readers who engage in a discourse

obsessed with poetry and poetry-centered scholarship. The connection to Hellenistic

epigrammatists specifically is furthered by Kenner’s description of Pound’s poem as a “little

witticism,” “exemplum,” and “riddle,” a counter in a poetic discourse-game of revisions and variations.

Kenner’s “resurrection-men” are translators of ancient texts, revitalizers of tradition. This kind of resurrection gives new life not just to the ancient but also the modern language; not just to dead poets, but also to living ones. Figures of mutual revivification appear repeatedly in modernist discussions of the translation of ancient texts, as can be seen, for example, in T.S.

Eliot’s praise for H.D.’s Euripides: “H.D. is a poet . . . and often she does succeed in bringing something out of the Greek language to the English, in an immediate contact which gives life to both, the contact which makes it possible for the modern language perpetually to draw sustenance from the dead” (“Classics in English” 102-3).

Such figures easily become morbid, fatalistic. In Radio Corpse: Imagism and the

Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound, Daniel Tiffany asserts that “Pound views his translations not only as Images, but as images of the dead” (175). He notes that, for Pound,

contact with a remote literature from the past (which Pound calls "the tradition of the

dead") can, paradoxically, result in a transfusion of vital energy from the original to a

moribund literature in the present. Pound asserts, for example. that British literature in the

nineteenth century was "kept alive" by "exotic injections" of foreign literature . . . . Much

more frequently, however, Pound alludes to a process whereby the original author or text

is brought to life, resurrected, through a depletion of the translator's vitality, or more

seriously, through a reification, a deadening, of his native language. (191)

As this description makes clear, the ambivalence about whether the resurrections of translation, and of classical reception more broadly, entail a reciprocal silent or death-like state is bound up with an often calculated exchangeability of texts and selves, or even of whole languages and selves. Tiffany quotes Pound’s remarks on his Homage to Sextus Propertius: “There was never any question of translation . . . . My job was to bring a dead man to life” (189). As even a light perusal of the Propertius project shows, and many classical scholars were quick to point out, it is not a translation in a strict or scholarly sense; although there is much translation in it, there are also outrageous liberties and augmentations. But Pound’s comment suggests that these liberties and augmentations might be an attempt to more effectively reanimate the dead man Sextus

Propertius.

Aldington’s comments about translating the Anthology evince a similar ambiguity between mortals and texts. His translations of Anyte appeared first as the second installment of the Poets’ Translation Series in 1915, then were published in his Medallions in Clay in 1921 along with his translations of Meleager and Anacreon. His description of the translation process in that collection’s preface points to the same indeterminacy between poem and poet that we saw in Meleager’s Garland proem:

Time which has dealt so cruelly to their flesh has spared their words and, as I bent above

them, trying to re-think their thoughts, to re-live their emotions, I sometimes forgot the

poem to think of the poet . . . In the imagination I saw you, Anyte, chaste, frail and fierce,

a huntress on the hills of Tegea, crowned with cold violets, a lover of lonely forests, one

familiar with death, austere, intense and virginal; and you Meleager, a handsome old

drunkard, an Attic Verlaine without a conscience or a snub-nose, boasting your

infidelities in suave couplets and excusing your crapulous passions with elaborate

conceits . . . . (9)

For Aldington, translation involves “trying to re-think [the] thoughts, to re-live [the] emotions” of the poem’s author. Or is it an anthropomorphization of the words themselves? The second pronoun in “as I bent above them” seems to refer to “their words,” as they are what he would be

“bent above,” but the image conjured is of a medical examiner bent over bodies. Further, his descriptions of Meleager and Anyte make himself and H.D. seem like their reincarnations.

Zilboorg reports that Aldington formed “a private mythology . . .which had particular intimate meanings . . . . [V]iolets and whiteness came to suggest H.D. to him. Meleager assumed the status of the ideal bard, the poet who was at once lover, writer, and editor” (70). With her austerity and “cold violets,” this Anyte would be right at home in a Sea Garden poem. We can see how this figure would be limiting for a writer, though: the description of Meleager mentions his writing and his body, makes him seem human and author, while Anyte is an aestheticized abstraction, her poetic authority a crown she wears.

Anyte in Reception

We have about twenty epigrams of Anyte. She was of Arcadia, and composing “slightly earlier than Theocritus, seems to have been among the first Hellenistic poets to describe pastoral settings within the context of the epigram” (Snyder 67). Her epigrams include both dedications and epitaphs, mostly for women and animals. Like the seaside statue of Aphrodite in her epigram, Anyte as we receive her is a liminal figure. Asserting that she belonged to “the earliest

generation of Hellenists,” Gow and Page note that, “though it is likely that not all of [her

epigrams] really served as inscriptions, all or nearly all preserve an inscriptional appearance”

(2.90). Her work exists within the pivot of the rock-to-paper movement and so call attention to the tensions created thereby in a way characteristic of Hellenistic epigram. In addition, many of her epigrams are epitaphic and therefore inherently liminal. The characterizations of her as masculine that we will see below are in keeping with this liminality, but late-twentieth-century female classicists call up a different Anyte.

Aldington’s cold Anyte has plenty in common with pre-feminism classicists’ conjurings of her. In The Woman and the Lyre, Jane Macintosh Snyder quotes Aldington’s comments alongside contemporary ones by F. A. Wright:

Curiously enough the qualities of [Anyte's] verse are all of the kind that it is usual to call

masculine. Simple, vigorous, restrained, she has none of that somewhat florid exuberance

which marks the inferior feminine in art: she is a Jane Austen rather than a George Eliot,

an Ethel Smyth rather than a [Cécile] Chaminade. (77)

Snyder concludes: “No doubt it is as profitless to view Anyte as a ‘masculine’ writer as it is to envision her as a virgin huntress. If we look at the poems themselves—epitaphs, dedications, and pastorals—we see a master of the epigram and a creative artist whose work helped shape the idyllic dreamworld of Arcadia” (77). Gutzwiller, too, sees a problem with earlier depictions of

Anyte:

Scholarly assessment of Anyte has been influenced by Wilamowitz’ claim [in 1924] that

there is nothing ‘personal’ or ‘womanly’ in her poetry, that it has ‘no definite tone.’ I

assert, on the contrary, that Anyte may have been the first epigrammatist to project a

distinct literary persona, and that she did this by setting herself, as a woman and an

inhabitant of largely rural Arcadia, in opposition to the anonymous composer of

traditional epigram. (55)

Gutzwiller goes on to assert that, contra “the predominantly male perception of death” in

epigram, Anyte offers “a world of female grief” (59). Anyte’s tenderness does not appear in

Aldington’s vision of her, despite his inclusion of translations of her maiden and animal epitaphs.

In “The Shrine,” though, the god is invoked particularly for her tenderness; H.D.’s

reception invokes a more nuanced Anyte than Aldington’s. For Miriam Leonard, who studies

nineteenth and twentieth century receptions of Greek tragedy, “[t]he dialectic between

presentism and historicity structurally embedded in the notion of reception has the potential to

make classics a dynamic political force with a stake in ‘what is still happening’” (126). H.D. was

able to work with this dialectic in a way that reinforces female power within tradition, calling

forth a powerful female deity and alluding to a tradition of female poets.

"The Shrine" and "The Shrine" in Criticism

Adalaide Morris emphasizes how “The Shrine” and related Sea Garden poems function to establish a reciprocal relationship between speaker and god, claiming that “[t]he poems in Sea

Garden are thrown out as bridges to the sacred. They project themselves toward the gods with a plea that the gods will in return appear to the speaker” (98) and can be read as “utterances that instantiate a relationship between addresser and addressee . . . in a series of specific discourse situations that perform a reality the poems declare to be the case” (117-8 fn8). Similarly,

Gregory places “The Shrine,” along with other Sea Garden poems—“Sea Gods,” “The Cliff

Temple,” and “Hermes of the Ways”—in the romantic “theophanic” tradition in which “the poem is the locus in which ‘the return of the gods takes place’” (83). Gregory quotes at length from Lawrence Kramer’s discussion of theophanic poems, and her connections between it and

the Sea Garden poems are useful enough to quote her at length in turn, because they highlight an

interchangeability of poet, speaker, and addressee:

As Kramer elaborates it, the theophanic poem, as a kind of mirror of the poet’s

summoning of creative power, begins with “the first act of naming” that is “always a

recognition of the gods’ absence,” followed by self-doubt projected as the impossibility

of the gods’ return. Then, in compensation for this barrenness,

the poet's doubt leads away from itself by assuming blindly the burden of its

desire and bringing forward a series of images for the theophany that may be

denied it. These images are not images of the gods alone, and sometimes not

images of the gods at all; they give central place to a number of metonyms of

divine presence, which embody the transfigurations that the gods would bring if

they came. . .

The emergence of these images out of absence and self-doubt "create[s] the illusion that

the sought-for theophany is in the process of taking place" . . . When the theophany does

appear, the god is often manifest not directly but invisibly in terms of altered vision,

receding namelessly again into an animated landscape. (83-4)

Gregory reads “Sea Gods” as an example, because this works best with Kramer’s definition, but

"The Shrine" fits the formula in many respects as well. In the first section, a doubting speaker begins with questions that seem to ask whether the god of 9.144 is still around, inhabiting the cliffs of her seaside precinct (“Are your rocks shelter for ships—” (1) ; “Are you graded—a safe crescent . . . ? ”(3)).The speaker answers her own questions, implying the god is absent and unable to reply, implying these were just rhetorical questions to herself that, in turn, suggest the

answer that is in fact explicitly given: “Nay.” By the end of the section, the addressed entity

begins to seem nothing more than an archaic deification/anthropomorphization of natural

elements:

you sink as the tide sinks,

you shrill under hail and sound,

thunder when thunder sounds.

You are useless— (25-8)

By the end of the poem, however, a successful summoning is claimed:

your eyes have pardoned our faults,

your hands have touched us;

you have leaned forward a little

and the waves can never thrust us back

from the splendour of your ragged coast. (83-8)

In a 1986 essay that calls the poem "a ritual passage of entrance into the sacred mysteries of the

sea garden,” and an “imitat[ion of] a rite of passage into the sacred place of the goddess,”

Gregory notes that “It does not seem to matter precisely who this [goddess] figure is, whether

Artemis or Aphrodite . . . for to H.D. the two were often fused” (539). Gregory is able to make

such claims even more strongly in H.D. and Hellenism, in which she demonstrates that, in H.D.’s poetry, “[b]eyond the images of Athene, Artemis, Demeter and Persephone, and Hera is a powerful figure who remains finally unnameable” (117). Robert Duncan also emphasizes the changeable nature of “The Shrine”’s addressee, suggesting that it “refer[s] to a persona or mask of the emotional regularity in women, of sudden “treacherous” moods and passions that make

Scylla—or here may it not be Artemis-Scylla—a prototype” (228-9).

Gregory’s paraphrase of Kramer, that the theophanic poem is “a kind of mirror of the poet’s summoning of creative power,” suggests a mirroring not just between the poem and the poet’s summoning, but between creative power and the divinity. It is as though, Kramer and

Gregory suggest, what the poet is really summoning is The Poet. From this perspective, we see the distinction between addressee and speaker wobble, resulting in the poet’s exploitation of that indistinction. We can see this movement at work in “The Shrine” most clearly in the second section:

O but stay tender, enchanted

where wave-lengths cut you

apart from all the rest—-

for we have found you,

we watch the splendor of you,

we thread throat on throat of freesia

for your shelf.

You are not forgot,

O plunder of lilies,

honey is not more sweet

than the salt stretch of your beach. (40-50)

Here, the speakers link their remembrance (“You are not forgot”), vision (“we watch”), and gifts to the god’s presence (“stay . . . for we thread”), figuring themselves as visionaries and suggesting that they are creating a relationship that mutually constitutes its partners. The poet mirrors the Hellenistic tradition by employing some of its key tropes, like the garlanding metaphor, and the transmutation of the oral into the written (“we thread throat on throat of

freesia / for your shelf”). Further, there are direct allusions to Meleager’s Garland. Lilies are associated with Anyte in Meleager’s proem, so the one addressed “O plunder of lilies” could easily be Antye or her texts. Moreover, the lines “honey is not more sweet / than the salt stretch of your beach” allude to a famous epigram of Nossis, from book five of the Anthology:

Nothing is sweeter than Love; and every other joy

is second to it: even the honey I spit out of my mouth.

Thus Nossis says: and who didn't love Kypris,

doesn't know what sort of roses her flowers are. (5.170)

Nossis speaks as an initiate of the mysteries, with special knowledge and capable of recognitions unavailable to those who do not “know what sort of roses [Cypris’] flowers are.” Nossis’ poem has undeniably sexual connotations, but given the pervasive association between flowers, erotic love, and writing in Hellenistic poetry—and given Nossis’ known predilection for alluding to

Sappho, who is always associated with roses— this poem on one level asserts the superiority of lyric love poems to more-vaunted epic poetry, at least for those who know how to read them.

In co-opting Nossis’ praise of Cypris for her own, and weaving it into a reading of Anyte,

H.D. both recognizes the tradition and seeks its recognition of her own work. She also complicates the address circuit, compelling us to consider more seriously the possibility that it is not just Anyte with whom H.D. seeks to commune, but a female poet figure composited out of

Anyte, Nossis, Sappho—and maybe bien d’autres encore. This scheme recalls the claims of

Duncan and Gregory that many of H.D.’s figures are composite of or substitutable for others.

Like 9.144, the Anthology’s 5.170 functions to praise Cypris without addressing her directly. By alluding to it, H.D. is building up meaningful contexts for 9.144: the allusion fuses with the doubted harbor-god aspect of Aphrodite, her aspect as love god (and we will see later that, in

doing so, she is following the lead of Antipater, whose variation of 9.144 does just this). Also, by interjecting Nossis, another female epigrammatist, H.D. reminds us that Anyte’s work is part of a tradition, all the more because Nossis often alludes to Sappho (Gutzwiller 76).

“Is that a DEATH? and are there two?”

My reading of “The Shrine” assumes that the addressee is a goddess and that the speakers are trying to invoke her. The title and subtitle provide the setting: somewhere around a coastal shrine. The poem is divided into four sections. The first section implies a harbor god, meant to protect sailors. However, the speaker first declares the god malevolent (“Nay, you are great, fierce, evil”; “You have tempted men / But they perished on your cliffs”), and then unfit (“you are useless”). In the second section, the speaker becomes plural and changes tone, declaring the intention to reanimate the god (“O but stay tender, enchanted”). A crisis occurs in the third section:

we passed the men in ships,

we dared deeper than the fisher-folk;

and you strike us with terror,

O bright shaft.

Flame passes under us

and sparks that unknot the flesh—

sorrow, splitting bone from bone,

splendour athwart our eyes

and rifts in the splendour,

sparks and scattered light. (53-62)

While the speakers in the second section seem to be on land adorning the titular shrine, by the

third section they appear to be approaching the shrine from sea. It is implied that their journey

surpasses that of sailors or fishermen, those who want the harbor god’s protection for their ships

and bodies; they are figurative sailors seeking some figurative shelter or beneficence. Their

dedication to the figurative goal is proved through their willingness to submit their bodies to

violence. At the end of the third section, they seem to have been killed, silenced; the last word is

given to others:

Many warned of this,

men said:

there are wrecks on the fore-beach,

wind will beat your ship,

there is no shelter in that headland;

it is useless waste, that edge,

that front of rock—

sea-gulls clang beyond the breakers,

none venture to that spot. (63-71)

However, their voices are regained in the triumphant final section, which suggests, disturbingly,

that the third section’s violence was a purifying rite of passage, the destruction of a mundane,

material body presaging the liberation of souls, or some divine version of the descent into the

underworld known as katabasis or nekuia, in which to commune with a dead god. The poet has to enter the world of the dead or at least spill some blood. Here is the entire fourth section:

But hail—

as the tide slackens,

as the wind beats out,

we hail this shore—

we sing to you,

spirit between the headlands

and the further rocks.

though oak-beams split,

though boats and sea-men flounder,

and the strait grind sand with sand

and cut boulders to sand and drift—

your eyes have pardoned our faults,

your hands have touched us;

you have leaned forward a little

and the waves can never thrust us back

from the splendour of your ragged coast. (72-88)

The last stanza, though triumphant, is more than a little fatalistic, implying that the speakers are forever caught in “the splendour” that in the previous section was “athwart [their] eyes” and was part of the fiery apparatus of destruction. A reading in which death was all along the shelter and pardon they sought is not out of the question. While the speakers determinedly have voices, singing and hailing, it does not seem certain that they can have their mortal bodies back after the previous section’s violent ecstasies. The god is at her most embodied, implying a relationship between her reanimation and their death.

Reading “The Shrine”: Translating 9.144

In H.D.’s first section, we are presented with a local ecosystem, the assemblage of whose

activities has been interpreted as a single agency, a god, and we see that this unified agency, the god’s self, is disarticulated and how the god’s agency seems to bleed back into the landscape under the pressure of the speaker’s battery of questions and denunciations. By the end of the poem, the god seems to have been reconstituted through address, through the agency of the speakers (who may or may not be wholly consistent in themselves), as might occur in a theophanic poem. In between, agency manifests in different ways as it moves through speaker, addressee, environment, and third-party interlocutors. All this is reminiscent of modernist poets’ descriptions of how agency works in their translation practices. Studying the translation challenges presented by 9.144 and how they were met by translators helps produce a reading of

“The Shrine” as about grappling with Anyte’s epigram.

Κύπριδος οὗτος ὁ χῶρος, ἐπεὶ φίλον ἔπλετο τήνᾳ, Greek αἰὲν ἀπ᾽ ἠπείρου λαμπρὸν ὁρῆν πέλαγος, ὄφρα φίλον ναύτῃσι τελῇ πλόον ἀμφὶ δὲ πόντος δειμαίνει, λιπαρὸν δερκόμενος ξόανον.

Kypridos outos o chōros, epei philon epleto tēna, Transliteration aien ap’ēpeirou lampron opēn pelagos, ophra philon nautēsi telē ploon amphi de pontos deimainei, liparon derkomenos xoanon.

Table 2.1

Epigram 9.144 is “on a precinct and statue” of Aphrodite, say Gow and Page, who also

note that there were a number of places in the ancient world where people worshipped Aphrodite

as a protector of sailors (2.99). It presents as a small, well-functioning system, a self-contained

whole. Any conflict is cut off before it starts, and the impersonal voice is confident and

declarative. Everything is in the present. Form and content correspond as two aspects of the same

whole. Natural forces, divine will, and human activity appear in concord: Cypris’ pleasure (the

philon in line 1 of 9.144 above) is present in the happiness of the sailors’ voyage (the philon in

line 3). Lampron, in the second line, is reflected in the final line’s liparon: the brightness of the

sea is balanced by the shining-ness of the Cyprian. Further, the clauses to which the two

adjectives belong are structured symmetrically: a ‘shiny’ adjective, a verb of seeing (suggested

by the infinitive oren and the participle derkomenos), and the noun that agrees with the shiny

adjective (pelagos, ‘sea’, in line 2; xoanon, ‘carved image’ or ‘statue’, in line 4). These are verbs

of seeing, adjectives of reflected light: Aphrodite looks at the sea, and the sea looks back. The

epigram is profitably read through Day’s explanation of how archaic dedicatory epigram works:

we see the reciprocity and increase characteristic of charis: the present tense telē, the verb of

completion that in 9.144 describes Aphrodite’s effect on the voyages, suggests a harmonious

eternal present cyclical stability, with circles of goodwill and continuity between nature, the

human, and the divine. “The Shrine” explores 9.144’s circuitry and manifests a reading that, in

keeping with H.D.’s nonlinear vision of tradition-building and transmission, engages and reactivates a game of substitutions and displacements. Reading “The Shrine” within the context of translating 9.144 lets us see it as being, like the sea-flower poems, a weaving of itself into an

Alexandrian tradition.

This spot is sacred to Cypris; for she ever loves to behold from the land the glittering main; that she may give to the mariners a Lewis Farnell voyage such as they desire; and all the surrounding sea trembles when it sees the (1896) radiant image. (690)

This is the Cyprian’s ground, since it was her pleasure ever to look from land on the shining sea, that she may give fulfillment of their voyage to sailors; and around the J. W. Mackail deep trembles, gazing on her bright image. (1906) (211)

This place is the Cyprian’s for she has ever the fancy To be looking out across the bright sea, Ezra Pound Therefore the sailors are cheered, and the waves (1916) Keep small with reverence, beholding her image. Anyte (canto II, “Homage to Quintus Septimius Florentis Christianus,” Lustra)

This is the place of Cypris, for it is sweet to her To look ever from the land on the bright deep W. R. Paton That she may make the voyages of sailors happy (1917) And around the sea trembles looking on her polished image. (3:75)

This is the land of Kypris, since it pleases her to gaze forever from land over the glittering sea. So that she may bear the sailors safe to land; and the sea quivers, Richard looking upon her shining image. (16) Aldington (1921)

This is the precinct of the Cyprian, since she likes to come here always to watch the sunlit sea from the mainland Jane McIntosh So that she may accomplish a lovely voyage for sailors. Snyder (1989) The waves tremble as they behold her gleaming wooden image. (75)

This is the precinct of the Cyprian, since it pleases her always from land to look upon a shining sea, Kathryn So that she may make sailing pleasant for sailors; and the water Gutzwiller round about trembles, gazing at her gleaming image. (68) (1998)

Table 2.2

The above translations help show what resistances 9.144 has to English translation, and what different strategies for dealing with them have been used by seven twentieth-century authors.

Pound, H.D., Aldington, and some others saw themselves reviving something of ancient Greek poetry that was deadened by nineteenth-century classical reception, if not by Latinized classical reception since the fall of Rome or earlier. Rather than connecting the poems to the past,

Hellenized modernists viewed the writing and reception of intervening centuries as getting in the way. When Eliot praises H.D.’s mutually “fertilizing” translations of Euripidean choruses, it is for “immediacy with the Greek” (101). To demonstrate this “revivification” at work in early twentieth-century translations of 9.144, some nineteenth-century ones are helpful as well.

Robert Bland Cythera from this craggy steep (1806) Looks downward on the glassy deep, And hither calls the breathing gale, Propitious to the venturous sail; While ocean flows beneath, serene, Awed by the smile of Beauty's Queen. (10)

George Burges This is the spot of Venus; since it was a delightful thing for her to be ever (1854) looking upon the shining sea, whilst she was bringing to an end a voyage agreeable to sailors. But the sea around feels a fear, while it looks upon the glossy statue. (183)

Charles Neaves, This Venus' favourite haunt: 'tis her delight Lord Neaves To look from land upon the ocean bright, (1874) And speed the sailor's course. The ambient brine Quails as it sees the image in her shrine. (56) Table 2.3

Considering “The Shrine” a reception, though not a translation, of 9.144, we must therefore read its elements and design as addressing the same challenges as those the direct translators face.

H.D.’s translation-alternative is a manifestation of her Hellenistic, garlandy syncretism: it does not intend to replace translations, but to go alongside them, as a variation and elaboration that is a different way of bringing ancient Greek into modern English.

Naming the God: Κύπριδος οὗτος ὁ χῶρος [Kypridos outos o chōros]

Anyte’s first clause defines the land and the god in terms of each other. Though simple,

Kypridos outos o chōros still presents the translator with significant choices, especially in terms

of what to do with the genitive Kypridos. The nineteenth-century translators ditch the demonym

“Cypris” or “Cyprian” in favor of more Anglo-traditional names for Aphrodite: Burges and

Neaves choose the Latinate “Venus,” and while Bland’s choice of “Cythera” is less scrutable

(why not the metrically equivalent and closer-to-the-Greek “Cyprian”?), it was possibly chosen for its larger presence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and literature. By the early twentieth century, translators, scholarly and poetic alike, go with “Cypris” or “Cyprian.” With an impulse opposite to that of the nineteenth-century translators, Aldington likely thought the

“Kypris” more “authentic”: it looks and sounds more Greek. Aldington wants his reader to feel the distance, but also to feel like she is reading the ancient Greek. The early translators’ imagined reader wants the foreign made familiar; Aldington’s wants the familiar (English) made foreign through retention of unidiomatic elements from the original.

Another decision must be made in rendering choros, for which Liddell and Scott list two definitions: “I. a piece of ground, ground, place,” and “II. a land, country”; and all of the twentieth-century men use one of those words. Snyder, and Gutzwiller following her, use

“precinct,” which would normally be used to translate temenos; the choice emphasizes the designation of the land as sacred (at least for their classicist audience). Neaves’ “haunt” is particularly appealing in the context of this chapter, because it suggests the god’s permeating presence, her ghostliness or deadness, her unreality and indistinguishability from her precinct.

The equivalence between the Cyprian and this particular place, suggested by the first line of

Anyte’s quatrain, is cause for doubting her agency in the first section of “The Shrine,” in which the god dissolves into natural elements:

but you—you are unsheltered,

cut with the weight of wind.

you shudder when it strikes,

then lift, swelled with the blast.

you sink as the tide sinks,

you shrill under hail and sound,

thunder when thunder sounds.

you are useless:

when the tides swirl

your boulders cut and wreck

the staggering ships. (21-31)

While Anyte’s epigram anthropomorphizes the sea, attributing fear and sight to it in the last line, the first section of H.D.’s poem instead naturalizes the god. The effacement of the god’s name is part of this process. The reciprocal relationship between Cyprian and sea is maintained, but, in the first section of “The Shrine,” it is a reciprocity of volatility instead of gazes and light.

Ophra

Anyte’s third line, ophra philon nautēsi telē ploon, is difficult to translate idiomatically, as the English translations demonstrate. The verb is telē, from telein: to bring about, accomplish, end, fulfill. The subject is the Cyprian: She fulfills, accomplishes. What does she accomplish or fulfill? Philon ploon: the loved or dear voyage. My most literal rendering is this: “so that she accomplishes the loved voyage for sailors,” reading nautēsi as the dative of “advantage” (she brings about a happy voyage to the sailors’ advantage). This inevitably-awkward-in-English-

but-correct rendering accords with Snyder, Farnell, and Mackail; Paton pluralizes “voyage” and

Gutzwiller makes it “sailing”; Snyder, Farnell, and Mackail try the hardest to retain a precise

sense of tele as entailing completion. But the awkwardness of their renderings explains why

Paton and Gutzwiller use the verb “make.”

The neat harmony of sea, sailors, and Cyprian is at stake in translating this clause. The

first clause was simple enough: this place is the Cyprian’s. The second clause told us why the

precinct belongs to (or simply is) her: because she likes to, from land, look out over the sea. The

ophra clause makes things more complicated. Are we to read the first two lines as a causal chain,

i.e., it is hers because she likes to look at the sea, and she likes to do so because she helps bring

to pleasing end the voyages of sailors? Or is her pleasure in looking at the glittering sea distinct

from, though related to, her protection of sailors? Is her sailor-protection part of why this land is hers, or just a side effect? The poetic translator must decide whether to maintain the awkwardness of the clause, either believing it corresponds to an epistemological awkwardness, hailed to by the poem, one that destabilizes its harmony, or that emphasizes modern English’s

distance from third-century BCE Doric Greek or even to eliminates it, assuming an Anyte

persona who does not intend it.

In some interpretations, the sailors’ clause ruptures the reciprocal shininess and gazing of

god and sea, as though man were out of sync with nature and the divine, fallen; in others, there is

no rupture. Aldington’s translation heightens the clause’s awkwardness by making it an abrupt

fragment, in keeping with his previously-mentioned strategy of retaining challenging elements in

his translations. Pound effaces it by taking significant liberties, making the sailors themselves

subject of the clause and declining to translation ploon (“voyages”) at all. The sea-men do not act

in this poem; only the god and the sea are proper subjects. Their desire is relegated to an

adjective (often a gerund in English) for ploon; the sailors have no agency in this epigram save a

desire that doesn’t even adhere to them grammatically, but to their voyages, their movements or

transports. These men of diminished agency are between the coastline’s apotheosis and the sea’s

divinely-inspired anthropomorphism, floating mid-way on the waves, caught in the circuit of

Aphrodite and the waves looking at each other.

Several groups of men appear in “The Shrine,” and all of them are either silent or speak against the gods. In the first stanza, we are introduced to “the quiet” and then “the quiet men.” The first stanza asks, “Are you full and sweet, / tempting the quiet / to depart in their trading ships?” (5-7). The full sweetness of Anyte’s epigram and its ancient Greek tempts translators, who are quiet in the sense that they are readers and writers, lending their “voices” to others. Or the quiet men might be the epigram’s sailors, who can’t speak to the translator, don’t tell her what they mean, why they sailed, what they believe: the quietness of the Greeks painted on Keats’ Grecian urn. “Full and sweet” is the antithesis of the shattered, astringent beauty Sea

Garden celebrates. If the temptation is to translate, the lines “you have tempted men / but they perished on your cliffs” (10-11) speak of failed translations, shipwrecked meanings that couldn’t make it whole to the other shore (i.e., the target language). Given that H.D. had already published, to some acclaim, translations of Euripides, and folds translations of numerous

Anthology authors into her work, her decision not to include anything like a direct translation of

9.144 suggests she found it uniquely untranslatable, something that shouldn’t be translated, but only apprehendable in the Greek. H.D. may have been unsatisfied with the 9.144 translations of those (men) who came before her, and “The Shrine” stands as the product of a reception practice that is alternative to direct translation, as intimate as and requiring translation, but not including translated elements.

In the second section we meet the landsmen, who are not quiet at all. Something has changed in this section; the first section had no first-person pronoun, and is peopled by “quiet men” who seek Aphrodite’s protection.

the landsmen tell it—I have heard—

you are useless.

And the wind sounds with this

and the sea (35-8)

Now, rather than merchant-sailors or warriors we have landsmen— perhaps the savvier, secularized descendants of the quiet men who turned landsmen after seeing successive generations smashed on cliffsides—men not at such a far remove from the speaker that she can’t hear them. These voices have replaced the god in whom they no longer believe; voices like these have depleted the god, just as voices before them invoked her. She lives and dies by address.

Now, rather than the sounds of wind and sea becoming indistinguishable from Aphrodite (“You shrill under hail and sound, / thunder when thunder sounds” (26-7)), it is the voices of the landsmen (“the wind sounds with this / and the sea” (36-7)). This displacement of voices suggests both how readily the authority stemming from voice can be reappropriated, and how tenuously it is connected to selves. In addition to the landsmen, the speakers define themselves in opposition to “men in ships,” “fisher-folk,” and “many” men who “warn” of the dangers of

Aphrodite’s coast. Whether these are distinct groups or overlapping, and whether the voice of the speaker in the first section belongs in one of these groups, is not specified. This reticence reinforces the fluidity and overlap of voices in a poem of reception that, like attempts to translate

it, explodes the apparent harmony of 9.144. “The Shrine” suggests not one harmonious world,

but many overlapping perceptual worlds that only sometimes fit together in qualified harmony.

Fear and Trembling

Anyte’s attribution of fear to the sea also complicates issues of agency. Should we see it

as figurative, a personification of a calm sea with small waves? Or is it an anthropomorphism, or

another kind of agency? If the sea’s agency is purely figurative, might not the god’s be? The

fear comes in the final line: ophra philon nautēsi telē ploon amphi de pontos deimainei, liparon

derkomenos xoanon. “But the sea all around startles, looking on her shining wooden statue.” The

central challenge is deimainei, the verb predicate to pontos, the sea, a verb formed from deima,

which indicates fear, horror. Liddell and Scott have “to be afraid” as the first definition and “to

fear” as the second. It wouldn’t sound right to say “and all around, the sea fears,” because we

don’t usually use “to fear” intransitively in English. But to say “is afraid” isn’t great either,

because it isn’t active enough. The scholarly translators all choose “tremble,” even though, given

its other uses in the Anthology, deimainein is definitely “to be afraid” or “to fear.” This is

significant, because being afraid requires subjectivity, agency; trembling and quivering do not.

Interestingly, none of our three nineteenth-century translators use “trembles”: their verbs are

“feel a fear,” “quails,” and “awes,” all of which maintain the anthropomorphic emphasis.

Pound’s “keep small with reverence” gives into what Gow and Page call “the temptation to accept the subj. (dependent on ophra)”; i.e., his version suggests that “so that” applies not only to tele but also to demainei. This clarifies the epigram’s logic: it more strongly marks the possibility that the sea’s fear is related to the sailors’ safety: because the sea is awestruck, it is calm; because calm, easy to voyage on.

Also at stake in translating deimainei is whether the sea’s response is erotic: to what

degree Aphrodite retains her love-god aspect when acting primarily as a harbor-god. Rendering deimainei “trembles” (or “quivers,” with Aldington) ramps up the eroticism in the circuit between Aphrodite and the sea. We have already seen “The Shrine” allude to the erotic authors

Meleager, Nossis, and possibly Sappho; another epigram with erotic elements, 9.143 by

Antipater of Sidon, factors in H.D.’s creation. A brief examination of this epigram strongly suggests its involvement, and sheds greater light on questions of eroticism and of subjectivity.

9.143 is a variation of 9.144, written by Antipater of Sidon about 200 years after Anyte.

However, it comes directly before 9.144 in the Palatine Anthology numeration and so in Paton’s

Loeb.

λιτός τοι δόμος οὗτος ῾ ἐπεὶ παρὰ κύματι πηγῷ litos toi domos outos epei para kymati pēgō ἵδρυμαι νοτερῆς δεσπότις ἠιόνοσ᾽, idrymai voterēs despotis ēionos, ἀλλὰ φίλος: πόντῳ γὰρ ἐπὶ πλατὺ δειμαίνοντι alla philos: pontō gar epi platy deimainonti χαίρω, καὶ ναύταις εἰς ἐμὲ σῳζομένοις. chairō, kai vautias eis eme sōzomenois. ἱλάσκευ τὴν Κύπριν ἐγὼ δέ σοι ἢ ἐν ἔρωτι ilaskeu tēn Kyprin egō de soi ē en epōti οὔριος, ἢ χαροπῷ πνεύσομαι ἐν πελάγει. ourios, ē charopō pneusomai en pelagei.

Table 2.4

Simple is this my dwelling (beside the big waves am I enthroned, the queen of the sea-

bathed beach), but dear to me; for I delight in the sea, vast and terrible, and in the sailors

who come to me for safety. Pay honour to Cypris, and either in thy love or on the gray

sea I shall be a propitious gale to bear thee on.

Paton’s translation is problematic. 9.143, like 9.144, uses the verb deimainō. The clause in which

Antipater uses it is more difficult to translate than the ophra clause. Antipater has pontō gar epi

platy deimainonti chairō, which Paton construes “for I delight in the sea, vast and terrible.”

Paton is using “in the sea” for pontō, “vast” for platy, and “terrible” for deimainonti.

Deimainonti appears here as a participle connected in some way to pontō (both are dative masculine singular). But platy is neuter and in the accusative case, so how can it be functioning the same way as the masculine, dative deimainonti, as it is in Paton’s translation? We must factor in, too, the same problem as before: how can the sea be “fearing”? If the participle and platy are translated substantively, as in “the fearing one” and “upon its (the sea’s) breadth,” we are no longer treating the sea as a personification, but we are still inserting another subjectivity, apparently distinct in the next clause from the sailors who takes on the fear that the sea had, with the same verb, in 9.144. (Deima, like so much else in this poetics, is transferable/convertible).

The most logical conclusion is that something has been lost, that none of the attempts are getting at the meaning. In this sense, even complete poems like Antipater’s are fragments; from there, it is only a small step to consider all the Anthology’s epigrams fragments, as one playing the Ergänzungsspiel would. In a Sea Garden world that loves disintegration, such loss is not loss, but an invitation to use or exploit the ambiguity in an elaboration or variation of one’s own.

Lines like Antipater’s final line, “Pay honour to Cypris, and either in thy love or on the gray sea I shall be a propitious gale to bear thee on,” encourages looking for new meanings by troping on the language already there, in a movement characteristic of Hellenistic epigram, a kind of

Ergänzungsspiel.

Fear in “The Shrine”

The translation of 9.144, and the second half especially, entails for H.D. a reckoning with a configuration of elements through which move flows of fear, desire, and agency that refuse to stay in the bounds of subjects or circuits of address. In “The Shrine,” this is manifest, as are the images of scattering and disarticulation in the third section:

Stay—stay—

but terror has caught us now. we passed the men in ships, we dared deeper than the fisher-folk; and you strike us with terror,

O bright shaft.

Flame passes under us and sparks that unknot the flesh, sorrow, splitting bone from bone, splendour athwart our eyes and rifts in the splendour, sparks and scattered light.

Many warned of this, men said: there are wrecks on the fore-beach, wind will beat your ship, there is no shelter in that headland; it is useless waste, that edge, that front of rock— sea-gulls clang beyond the breakers, none venture to that spot. (51-71)

Here H.D.’s speakers take the place, and take on the fear, of the personified sea in Anyte’s

original configuration. In the third section, as in the English translation of 9.144, the landsmen

are sidelined, commenting on or reacting to the interaction between Aphrodite and the sea—

except now, as in 9.143, the sea’s being-afraid or keeping-small has been transferred to a human

figure or figures, distinct from the sailors, whose presence opens up the epigram to more

figurative readings in which shelter, usefulness, and sea-voyaging have different meanings. “The

bright shaft” of lightning that strikes the speakers parallels the “bright image” or gaze of the god

that strikes fear into the waves of 9.144. It also seems to parallel the charis evoked by the

original text of the epigram—a brilliance (which, like that of the god, may or may not involve

delusions of presence) from which trying to capture even an iota risks shipwreck or

disarticulation of the target language. The fiery explosion is followed by an image of shipwreck

in the voice of other speakers. Their voices and the lonely gull sounds they evoke close out the

section with the sense that our worshippers’ voice is lost.

Her Bright Image

Epigram 9.144’s reflective pair lampron/liparon is easier to maintain in English than the symmetrical philons. They can be translated with the same word: Pound has “bright” for lampron; Mackail has “bright” for liparon. According to Liddell and Scott, lampros is used of, among other things, water and voices (like our “clear”) and with metaphorical connotations of freshness, vigor, and decisiveness (“λαμπρός”). Liparos is the gleaming of oiled things, with connotations of luxury (“λιπαρός”). This variation makes sense, because it is used to describe the god’s xoanon: “an image carved of wood, . . . generally, an image, statue” (“ξόανον”). Gow and

Page note that “xoanon should properly mean a wooden statue and there is no reason to doubt that meaning here” (2.99). In the last word of the epigram, we realize that the Cyprian is (at least

in one sense) a statue or carved image. This changes the sense of her looking out at sea; we now imagine a sea-facing statue instead of a god. Every twentieth-century translator renders this word

“image.” Only in Snyder’s “gleaming wooden image” and Paton’s “polished” do we get a sense of the materiality of the image.

In the statue in the shrine on the promontory, the god has a place from which she can exercise agency but which does not contain her. This place needs to be activated, however, by the address (prayers or propitiation) of external, human voices, as the reading of an epigram re- performs and so reactivates the circuit of goodwill between god and man. Without active attention, the circuit goes cold and the statue is just a statue. In this sense, we can see the statue as parallel to Anyte’s epigram in the 20th century: it has a material existence, but needs the voice of a poet-translator to have power, to live. Despite the clichéd impossibility of translation, a communion is asserted: faults, though inevitable, are pardoned, and the invoker has breathed enough life into Anyte or her text, has propitiated it enough, that it “lean[s] forward a little.”

your eyes have pardoned our faults,

your hands have touched us;

you have leaned forward a little

and the waves can never thrust us back

from the splendour of your ragged coast. (84-8)

What the evoked god or poet returns to the evoker is ambiguous: the gift can be interpreted as life or death, a voice-granting or a silencing. This ambiguity is maintained in “The Shrine”’s conclusion.

Conclusion

To calculate “linguistic and semantic directness to a source text,” Matthew Pfaff, who

attempts to bring “classical reception studies” strategies to contemporary avant-garde poetry,

creates a redescription of “the more tried and true designations of translation, adaptation, and

invention,” recasting them as kinds of reception: “epitextual,” “paratextual,” and “metatextual.”

Paratextual reception as Pfaff describes it is useful in understanding H.D.’s engagement with

Anyte:

I use paratextual (para: 'beside; next to, near, from; against, contrary, to') to describe a

host text's mode of reception which places it beside a Greek or Latin original, like

adaptation implying a philological or linguistic relationship that keeps an original text's

discrete linguistic forms in mind, even as it maintains various indirections and alterations

of those forms. (338)

Moves like the elaboration of Anyte’s opening clause into echoing descriptions of the land and

the god, as well as the variations of Anyte’s sailors, invite a reading practice that “keeps in mind” 9.144’s “discrete linguistic forms” alongside the new poem or “host text,” “The

Shrine.” In the next chapter, we will see H.D. move into “epitextual” territory, by which Pfaff means

like the idea of 'translation', to imply the sense of the Greek adjective prefix epi ('the

being upon or supported upon a surface or point'). . . an instance of reception's direct

proximity to, dependence, and reliance upon a source text's linguistic forms as its sole or

overwhelmingly primary means of receiving, translating, transporting, recreating, or

destroying its object. (338)

Heliodora, H.D.’s 1924 collection, is much more willing than Sea Garden to deal explicitly with the Anthology, including folding more translations of epigrams into poems, and we will see that

this more direct reception is practiced with as much careful attention as paratextuality is in Sea

Garden.

CHAPTER THREE: TRANSLATIONS OF MELEAGER IN HELIODORA

Argument

In this chapter, I explore epigram’s role in shaping H.D.’s poetics of textual relationality, a poetics whose central, motivating concerns include issues of originality that will not go away no matter how many times “originality” is debunked. I read two poems that incorporate epigrams, from H.D.’s 1924 Heliodora, “Heliodora” and “Nossis.” In both, a speaker witnesses

Meleager creating his “garlands.” Meleager’s authority and originality are explicitly celebrated, but they are at the same time implicitly challenged by the speaker’s contradictions, appropriations, and subversive translations. Meleager’s authority, the originality of his texts, is destabilized through the demonstrated violability of those text’s borders, a violability demonstrated by the citational practices H.D. employs. To detail these practices, I turn especially to Derrida’s use of the term “graft,” but also to some more recently circulating terms grappling with appropriative poetics, to talk about how texts interact in a way that emphasizes the movement between them instead of giving the older text primacy. I conclude with another

Heliodora poem, “Lais.”

Games of Completion

In his influential 1997 essay “Ergänzungsspiel and the Epigrams of Callimachus,” Peter

Bing recounts a tale of classical Athenians discovering a Bronze Age stele with an epigram reading, ‘This is the tomb of Deiope.’ The discoverers begin to wonder who Deiope was, who erected her stele, to what kind of city and culture the stele belonged; they speculate on all the parameters that would have been givens to readers of the archaic epigram. The Athenians in the story

sift through the clues they find in the inscription, and fill these out with elements of their

own knowledge so as to form a plausible whole. This activity might be called a process

of supplementation. In Hellenistic times, as epigram became increasingly "literary," that

process underwent a shift. No doubt the epigram retained most conventions of votive and

sepulchral inscription . . . . But while the epitaph of Deiope belongs to a monument

whose lack of context was accidental, Hellenistic epigram was often deliberately severed

from its object or monument, and set in the as yet uncharted territory of the book. Here

poets began to exploit, and play with, this process of supplementation in a deliberate and

artful way. Indeed, it became a favored and self-conscious device. (116)

This “device” Bing terms Ergänzungsspiel, which can be translated “game of supplementation”

as well as “game of completion.” Some Hellenistic epigrams, he argues, were specifically

designed to spark this additive speculation in their readers; Bing cites examples in which a few

suggestive lines from Callimachus encourage readers to supply a context or landscape in which

to situate the dedication.

This “supplementation process” is structurally similar to the processes of repetition, recombination, and variation practiced by the Hellenistic epigrammatists. As the reader who

imagines what Deiope’s tomb looks like, or to what dedicatory object a severed inscription

refers, so does the Hellenistic epigrammatist respond to an earlier epigram’s invitations:

imagining viable variations of its formula, taking cues from the earlier epigram’s own variations,

and working to supplement or complete a sequence or garland.

If, as William Furley puts it, archaic epigrams seek to “focus . . . a constellation of

separate entities into a permanent relationship” (151), then the Ergänzungsspiel epigrams of

Hellenists offered constellations missing stars, drawing attention to the perspectival contingency

of constellations and the possibility of using this constellating vision to draw different lines

between different points, to restate or vary an ostensibly “permanent relationship.”

Though modeled on a search for origins, the practice of Ergänzungsspiel makes this search a pretext. H.D.’s poems containing translations (or translation-others) of epigrams play the game of supplementation in both Bing’s sense of adding context to an original epigram that lacks it and in my co-opted use of Ergänzungsspiel to describe a poetics of adding variations

(including translations) to an existing poem or set of poems. Poetry becomes an ironic exercise in

which an ostensible intention to attribute agency or properties—to clearly demarcate people,

poems, or genres— ends up drawing attention to the ambiguity of those attributions, in the way

that a reader’s supplemental vision carries him away from the original instead of closer to it. This

is a figure for classical reception more generally: the more we probe ancient texts, the more we

realize that our conceptions of them are tangled in the intervening centuries of reading them and

writing about them; this added dimension is also what that connects us to them.

H.D.’s work with epigram provides a model for how to deal with ancient Greek texts in a

way that doesn’t turn to them purely as originary elements, but rather as elements to incorporate,

to draw inspiration from, but also to breathe new meaning into. It is not a counter-theory to essentialist myths of origins as much as a change in emphasis that allows H.D. to practice a classical reception that avoids reinforcing the damaging hierarchies that can come with it (the privileging of men and Western culture). The search for origins (that is, literary progenitors) in ancient Greek texts enacted in “Heliodora” and “Nossis” is a pretext to subvert them, to play games with them, maybe to mutilate and loot them, to invade them, to colonize them for the new voice—not to find a true self or poetic voice, but to create a functional one out of what is already there.

Supplementarity and Graft

As Barbara Johnson explains in the introduction to her translation of On Dissemination,

Derrida’s discourse on supplementarity is elucidated through examples from Rousseau, who

considers writing and masturbation as supplements to speech and sex (respectively). As such, per

Rousseau, they are secondary, to be used only when speech or sex are impossible: not preferable

to them, always subordinate to them, copies/imitations to their original. This supplementary

quality—the thing that makes them useful—also makes them threatening because they can

substitute for, and therefore replace, speech/sex. The supplement is both a copy of something and

something in its own right. Derrida argues a contradiction in the logic that hierarchizes these

binaries— ones that hold writing second to speech, most notably, and copies or imitations second

to originals. The contradiction in this logic of supplementarity stems from the assumption that

one term could claim closer proximity to something before difference: presence, origin, reality.

Such an essentialism is really not occurring in any supplementation, since the so-called “first term” is first only because a second term establishes it as such.

One of Derrida’s terms for thinking about texts’ relationality, while avoiding the hierarchizations of supplementarity, is “graft.” In On Dissemination, he uses the figure to read

Philippe Sollers’ Numbers, a complicated novel that is “explicitly heterogeneous and discontinuous: quotations, parentheses, dashes, cuts, figures, and Chinese characters are only the most visible manifestations of continual textual upheaval” (Johnson xxx). For Derrida,

[A]ll those textual samples provided by Numbers do not, as you might have been tempted

to believe, serve as "quotations," "collages," or even "illustrations." They are not being

applied upon the surface or in the interstices of a text that would already exist without

them. And they themselves can only be read within the operation of their reinscription,

within the graft. It is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in

the thickness of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating allogene through

which the two texts are transformed . . . . Each grafted text continues to radiate back

toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory. (356)

Rather than structuring the relationship between her Ergänzungsspiel poems and the epigrams they supplement as one of hierarchy, privileging one or the other, her poems treat the two texts as related through graft, embracing the connection through which they “are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition” (355). Graft, in the sense

Derrida suggests, I would argue, articulates the ambiguities of delineation that H.D.’s epigram poems enact.

“Heliodora”

“Heliodora” contains translated fragments from Meleager’s 5.147 and 5.144, discussed in the first chapter, and imagines a context for their creation. In this poem, two people, “[h]e and

I,” are making poetry for Heliodora. DuPlessis glosses the situation as “a contest or debate that takes place between two males” (Career 21). For Kenneth Rexroth, the two figures in the poem are Meleager and the H.D. who translates his poetry: “H.D. . . . was objectifying the story of her own possession by the ghost of Meleager. . . . she has conveyed the poignancy of that feeling of possession and the glamour of the beautiful Greek words as they come alive in one's very own

English” (“The Poet as Translator”). That “Heliodora” can be plausibly read as about either composing or translating poetry reflects how entwined translation was with H.D.’s poetic process, as it was with Pound’s. Drawing attention to similarities between translation and composition, and between interlocutors of flesh and of words, is part of the poem’s work.

“Heliodora” plays the game of supplementation with 5.147 and 5.144 in two ways: first, by

offering a supply of translation possibilities, and second, by creating a context to frame their

composition. In both ways, H.D.’s strategies of supplementation play with notions of authority and originality, pretending to draw clear lines between texts and authors, or texts and other texts, but actually demonstrating the impossibility of doing so, creating both blatant and more subtle ironies.

He said, among others,

I will bring

(and the phrase was just and good,

but not as good as mine)

"the narcissus that loves the rain."

We strove for a name,

while the light of the lamps burnt thin

and the outer dawn came in,

a ghost, the last at the feast

or the first,

to sit within

with the two that remained

to quibble in flowers and verse

over a girl's name.

He said, "the rain loving,"

I said, "the narcissus, drunk,

drunk with the rain." (5-21)

The speaker appears earnest in her endeavor to report faithfully (a) who authored which lines and

(b) the respective quality of those lines. The poem uses punctuation, italics, and frequent attributive tags (“he said,” “I said”) throughout to keep track, and the words enclosed by quote marks are mostly translated or transposed from 5.147 or 5.144. The three quotations in the above stanzas—” the narcissus that loves the rain,” “the rain loving,” and “the narcissus, drunk, / drunk with the rain”—try out possibilities for rendering Meleager’s narkissos philombros. This exploratory proliferation of slight variants, a translational act, is also practiced in the non- translated portions of the poem, as when the first stanza (“we sought together / . . . / rhymes and flowers; gifts for a name”) is recapitulated and given a slightly different flavor in the third (“We strove for a name /. . . . / . . .the two that remained / to quibble in flowers and verse / over a girl’s name”). These repetitions with slight variance are part of the way the poem destabilizes its own account of who said what and in what order. More ambiguities arise in the sixth and seventh stanzas:

Then he caught,

seeing the fire in my eyes,

my fire, my fever, perhaps,

for he leaned

with the purple wine

stained in his sleeve,

and said this:

"Did you ever think

a girl's mouth

caught in a kiss

is a lily that laughs?"

I had not.

I saw it now

as men must see it forever afterwards;

no poet could write again,

"the red-lily,

a girl's laugh caught in a kiss;"

it was his to pour in the vat

from which all poets dip and quaff,

for poets are brothers in this. (40-59)

The poem’s governing irony is highly concentrated in the wine-vat image. At the same time that the singularity and ownership of the lines are asserted, so are their communality and fluidity. On the one hand, we have a traditional, pre-post-structuralist author, in total possession of his lines

(“it was his to pour”), and on the other, mingling, liquid lines befitting Derridean dissemination

(“in the vat / from which all poets dip and quaff”). The previous stanza indicates the same thing by suggesting that the speaker’s own “fire” or “fever” is responsible for the other’s winning lines. In the eighth stanza, the speaker continues this thread: “So I saw the fire in his eyes, / it was almost my fire, / . . . . / it was almost my phrase” (60-1, 65).

Another irony within these, the sixth and seventh, stanzas is repeated and amplified in the fourteenth and final stanza:

I saw him out of the door,

I thought:

there will never be a poet,

in all the centuries after this,

who will dare write,

after my friend's verse,

"a girl's mouth

is a lily kissed." (115-127)

“Never another poet,” writes Steven G. Yao, “that is, until H.D. herself” (109), pointing out an irony that has persisted throughout the poem as the speaker repeats what is said to be unrepeatable. But while 5.147 has “laughing lilies” (ta gelōnta kriva), nowhere does Meleager bring words for mouths or kissing close to his lilies. None of the three iterations H.D. gives (“a girl’s mouth / is a lily kissed”; “the red-lily, / a girl’s mouth caught in kiss”; “a girl’s mouth / caught in a kiss / is a lily that laughs”) could be a translation of Meleager’s gelōnta kriva. Did

H.D. pluck the “kiss” from the neighboring narcissus or narkisson, an English word caught in the middle of a Greek one? Does Meleager’s authority over “laughing lilies” stretch to cover the words they elicited from a poet-translator whose imagination moves from laughing to mouths to kissing? To the same degree, maybe, that “a girl’s mouth / is a lily kissed” can be said to be an original image of H.D.’s. Assigning this image an author, in the way the speaker of this poem pretends to, does not seem possible.

The contradictory logic of “Heliodora,” a poem which on some levels—including the surface one— is a celebration of original genius, but on others the deconstruction of originality, gets at an uneasiness in the relationship between a translation and its original, on the one hand, and, on the other, the translation’s dual role as an aid that makes the original accessible—a supplement— and a poem in its own right. H.D. answers Meleager’s call to supplement, vary, and recombine his images. Meleager’s text is inserted into H.D.’s in the penultimate stanzas (91-

100; 110-114); The poem comes closest to straightforward translation as the Meleager-figure declaims his epigrams. Instead of being enclosed in quotation marks like other translated lines, though, the epigrams appear in italics. As the figure below shows, these are not quite translations, but they include translations, and Meleager’s texts are more clearly functioning as constraints here than in other parts of the poem: the relationship is epitextual.

I will plait in white violets and tender narcissus mid myrtle berries, I will “. . . I will bring plait laughing lilies too and sweet crocus and purple hyacinths and the roses you the lily that that take joy in love, so that the wreath set on Heliodora's brow, Heliodora laughs, with the scented curls, may scatter flowers on her lovely hair. (5.144) I will twine with soft narcissus, the myrtle, sweet crocus, white violet, the purple hyacinth and, last, the rose, loved of love, that these may drip on your hair the less soft flowers, may mingle sweet with the sweet of Heliodora's locks, myrrh-curled.” (91 -100) Already the white violet is in flower and narcissus that loves the rain, and “ . . the lilies that haunt the hillside, and already she is in bloom, Zenophila, and to-day love's darling, the sweet rose of Persuasion, flower of the flowers of spring. white violets Why do you laugh joyously, O meadows, full of pride in your bright tresses shine beside ? More to be preferred than all sweet-smelling posies is she. (5.147) white lilies adrift on the mountain side; to-day the narcissus opens

that loves the rain” (110-4)

Table 3.1

The epigram translations are inserted in a broken state, grafted to each other and to the rest of

“Heliodora.” Translated lines or phrases (“loved of love”; “narcissus that loves the rain”; “the

lily that laughs”) leak out of the translations and get seeded, sometimes with variation, in other parts of the poem. Like the words poured into the fraternal vat in line 57, these translated fragments permeate the poem. Belying its speaker’s attempts to designate authority and origins,

“Heliodora” incorporates 5.144 and 5.147 in a way that shows that the volatile boundaries between texts preclude clean designation. In this way, H.D. participates directly in the

Ergänzungsspiel that generated the garland sequence these two epigrams are part of (see chapter

1). Like Meleager and other Hellenistic epigrammatists, H.D. recombines, reiterates, and varies

elements from the epigram tradition to create a new poem; like them, she uses strategies that

flaunt the concept of authority in order to wield it (by authoring poems).

Meleager’s authority in “Heliodora” is made inextricable from H.D.’s, a rhetorical

strategy to bind her poems to the tradition. The inextricability (which “graft” figures so well) can

be most clearly seen in lines like the false or supplemented translation of “laughing lilies,” onto

which is grafted (among other variations) the “girl’s mouth / caught in a kiss.” Where does

H.D.’s image end and Meleager’s begin? When we reach the part of “Heliodora” that most

directly translates the epigrams, gelōnta kriva behaves itself, appearing as “lilies that laugh.” But

given the structure of the poem, “lilies that laugh” seems as a revision, an Imagist or

epigrammatic concentration, of the “original” image—the “girl’s mouth / caught in a kiss,” that

came first in the poem—as though H.D.’s image has influenced Meleager’s, instead of the other way around, making us read back into the gelōnta kriva this mouth, this scene.

This flipped arrow of influence is brought about through “translation as transgressive appropriation and hybridism (or cross-breeding),” to borrow language from Haroldo de Campos, according to whom

Creative translation—"transcreation"—is the most fruitful manner of rethinking

Aristotelian mimesis, which has made such a profound mark on Western poetics.

Rethinking it not as a passivizing theory of copy or reflection, but as a usurping impulse

in the sense of a dialectic production of difference out of sameness. (17)

De Campos does not present transcreation as an alternative to mimesis, but a “rethinking” of it that is “fruitful.” De Campos’ definition is itself a usurping act of classical reception, conjuring an Aristotle who blesses experimental poetry. He is able to both use the powerful rhetoric of alluding to antiquity and make a bold, future-oriented redescription. The speaker in “Heliodora” evinces a “usurping impulse” that drives the poem’s creative translation of 5.147 and 5.144.

The two epigrams have been grafted together in precisely the recombinatory manner

Meleager encourages. Poems 5.147 and 5.144 are imagined as having a twin birth. Yet only one name wins out: 5.144, home of the philombros narkissos or storm-loving narcissus, is addressed to Heliodora’s other, Zenophile, the other name/girl Meleager’s epigrams celebrate. How different would this poem and its collection be if, instead of bearing a name that means “Sun’s

Gift,” it bore one that meant “Stranger-Lover”? Would it be too on point for this collection of poems that pull other poems into themselves? For H.D., Helios is always the name of a god,

Apollo or a proto-Apollo; when the speaker in “Heliodora” refers to the Muses, “the nine, / our own king’s mistresses” (70-71), that king is Apollo. It is Apollo who presides over the paradigm

of original genius celebrated at one level of “Heliodora,” over the Meleager imagined as composing orally, forging words from inner fire, and it is 5.147 that manifests most clearly and gets more allusions. But citations from 5.144 frame those of 5.147 (ring composition again), and the Meleager of textual games who delights in variation and re-appropriation, who varies and recombines the tropes and images of Callimachus and Asclepiades to create these poems, is inextricable from the visionary-genius-Meleager in H.D.’s poem.

Graft in the Anthology

The graft analogy’s applicability to epigram production did not go unnoticed by

Anthology authors; a small sequence of three poems addresses it directly:

I, the wild pear-tree of the thicket, a denizen of the wilderness where the wild beasts

feed, once bearing plenty of bastard fruit, have had foreign shoots grafted on me, and

flourish now no longer wild, but loaded with a crop that is not my natural one. Gardener,

I am deeply grateful for thy pains, owing it to thee that I now am enrolled in the tribe of

noble fruit-trees. (9.4, by Cyllenius)

This pear-tree is the sweet result of the labour of my hand, with which in summer I fixed

the graft in its moist bark. The slip, rooted on the tree by the incision, has changed its

fruit, and though it is still a pyraster below, it is a fragrant-fruited pear-tree above. (9.5 ,

by Palladas)

I was a pyraster; thy hand hath made me a fragrant pear-tree by inserting a graft, and I

reward thee for thy kindness. (9.6, by Palladas)

This triplex is followed by a sequence in which a blind beggar and a legless one join together to make one functional mendicant (9.11, 9.12, 9.13, 9.13B). Both conceits figure the production

process of literary epigram, and both show it to be an enterprise which “treat[s its] discourse as the product of various sorts of combinations and insertions” (Culler, On Deconstruction

105). According to William Henderson, in the Palladas pair, “the phases of pleasant labour, grafting, new fruit and reward become metaphors for composing verse, grafting new shoots on to the old stock of the Greek poetry of the past”(65). Henderson easily aligns “the Greek poetry of the past” with the wild and uncultivated. Derrida’s comment in On Dissemination that

Mallarme’s Mimique “is haunted by the ghost or grafted onto the arborescence of another text”

(202) also seems to suggest that pre-existing texts should take the role in the analogy of the tree to which a graft, the new poem, is applied.

But it is not as though the cultivar came from nowhere; it grew first and is the one whose traits the grafter wants to repeat, perpetuate, maybe even pervert. For most of H.D.’s

Ergänzungsspiel poems, it makes more sense to think of the epigrams as grafted onto H.D.’s wild pyrasters, quickening their maturity and helping them bear fruit. However, the principles suggested by both the Anthology and H.D. discourage us from too quickly or permanently assigning new or old poetry to rootstock or scion. In Matthew Gumpert’s words, “Every graft can be resolved into its scion and its stock, but that resolves little, since each of these constituent elements is already a graft of distinct meanings, commercial, botanical, genealogical, racial, linguistic” (xiii).

Nossis

“Nossis,” the other Meleager-possession poem, also contains translated elements of two

Anthology poems. The first is from the opening lines of Meleager’s prooemium, 4.1, discussed in chapter 1, in which he lists the authors included in his garland and associates each with a flower or other plant; the other from the most celebrated epigram of Nossis, 5.170, introduced in

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the previous chapter. Like “Heliodora,” “Nossis” finds the speaker in thrall to Meleager while

witnessing, and, it is implied, influencing, the creation of a poem about a name that is also “a

girl.” But rather than exciting the poet to creation through her hair’s remarkable softness like

Heliodora, Nossis inspires as a predecessor, through her poetry. At the same time, Nossis’ poem

is presented as coming through Meleager and as inextricable from his garland. By including two

epigram translations from different poets, “Nossis” complicates further the questions of authority

treated in “Heliodora.”

As “Heliodora” radiates out from the epiphanic creation of gelōnta kriva and narkissos

philombros, “Nossis” radiates out from the imagined moment when Meleager comes up with the

description of Nossis for his prooemium, which Mackail translates “the spice-scented flowering

iris of Nossis, on whose tablets Love melted the wax” (93). In the first lines of H.D.’s “Nossis,”

we quickly recognize the rapt speaker and bombastic Meleager of “Heliodora,” and the poem

begins and ends with identical stanzas, in another nod to Meleager’s ring composition:

I thought to hear him speak

the girl might rise

and make the garden silver,

as the white moon breaks,

“Nossis,” he cried, “a flame.” (1-5, 76-81)

As in the previous chapter, classical reception is figured as raising the dead. Even before the

translations are introduced, this stanza demonstrates the fluidity of poetic authority, as the

sudden illumination seems to come at once from Meleager’s creative reception of Nossis and the

speaker’s creative reception of Meleager. It is perfect to read through Agamben’s Valéry- inspired definition of poetry as enjambment, as well. The first line, “I thought to hear him

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speak,” cut off as its own unit, bearing complete meaning for a split second, might be a description of reading or hearing, a representation of how the reader cedes her thoughts to the words of a text. The subject to whom “to hear” more likely belongs reveals herself in the second line: “the girl” who “might rise.” Again, enjambment gives us the transitory nanosecond lull in which “I thought to hear him speak the girl might rise” has the possibility of its own integrity.

The infinitive “to hear” at this point seems predicated of the girl, presenting two main interpretive possibilities: the girl rises in order to hear him speak; or, the girl rises because he speaks in some other sense, perhaps that he brought her into existence from the void.

In the next two stanzas, the Meleager figure strives to preserve and transmit Nossis, to allow her to be remembered: “Only a hundred years or two or three, / has she lain dead / yet men forget” (21-3). The speaker posits that he gives her “shelter”: “his was a shelter / wrought of flame and spirit” (34-5). Shelter is treated with ambivalence in H.D.’s oeuvre, as we saw in Sea

Garden: on the one hand, it is necessary for survival; on the other, it is confining. One poem’s reception of another might be a sheltering, but it can also be, to use de Campos’ term, a usurpation. H.D.’s transcreation of the opening lines of 4.1, Meleager’s prooemium, which comprises the fourth stanza, illustrates this.

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“Who made the To whom, dear Muse, do you bring these varied fruits of song, or who was it who wreath, wrought this garland of poets ? The work was Meleager's, and he laboured on it to for what man was give it as a keepsake to glorious Diocles. Many lilies of Anyte he inwove, and it wrought? many of Moero, of Sappho few flowers, but they are roses ; narcissus, too, heavy speak, fashioned with the clear song of Melanippides and a young branch of the vine of Simonides all of fruit-buds, ; and therewith he wove in the sweet-scented lovely iris of Nossis, the wax for song, my loveliest, whose writing-tablets Love himself melted. say Meleager brought to Diocles, (a gift for that enchanting friend) memories with names of poets

He sought for Moero, lilies, and those many, red-lilies for A nyte, for Sappho, roses, with those few, he caught that breath of the sweet-scented leaf of iris, the myrrh-iris, to set beside the tablet and the wax which Love had burnt, when scarred across by Nossis.” (41-59)

Table 3.2

In 4.1, Love (Eros) melts the bees’ wax for Nossis’ writing tablets (presumably because her

verses honor Love and Love wants more of them), something that would be done before she

wrote on them. H.D.’s formulation mangles up this fairly straightforward statement, giving us

“the tablet / and the wax / which Love had burnt, / when scarred across by Nossis,” entangling the agencies of Love and Nossis and making the tablet’s melting more directly attributable to the poet.

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But H.D.’s most significant alteration is an omission: Melanippides and Simonides have

been removed from the list, so that in H.D.’s version all the poets listed are women: Moero,

Anyte, Sappho, and Nossis. Her poem also, of course, omits the forty-something poets listed after Nossis, and the whole scenario makes it seem as though the beginning of 4.1 is preamble to the presentation of Nossis’ 5.170.

H.D.’s translation also alters two other significant details, both of which make agency more complicated. First, she has Meleager addressing his own garland, exhorting it to “speak” and “say.” In a Hellenistic move, she effaces the Muse, Meleager’s addressee, and replaces it with the Garland, the text itself, the true interlocutor. She also makes some serious disruptions in her treatment of the lines about Nossis.

Mackail, which Gregory called H.D.’s “bible” as far as the Anthology was concerned

(169), translates this line well: “the spice-scented flowering iris of Nossis, on whose tablets Love melted the wax” (93). H.D. renders these lines this way: “he caught / that breath of the sweet-

scented / leaf of iris, / the myrrh-iris,/ to set beside the tablet / and the wax / which Love had

burnt, / when scarred across by Nossis.” As a translation, this is a butchery. One shouldn’t figure

something as “breath” and then set it beside objects on a table. There are only six verbs in the list

part of the prooemium, none of which is well-rendered “caught” or “breathed in” (Gow and Page

2.596). H.D. pulls apart the pneuma (breath) and myro (myrrh) of Meleager’s adjective

myropnoun —“myrrh-breathing”; translated “spice-scented” by Mackail and “sweet-scented” by

Paton— but also includes “sweet-scented” (her “sweet scented/ leaf of iris” may be influenced

by Paton’s “sweet-scented lovely iris”). “Leaf of iris” and “myrrh-iris” could be rendering (or

rending) the two adjectives that agree with irin (“iris”)” the afore-mentioned myropnoun and

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euanthamon (“flowery,” “blooming”)—renderings that make them inextricable from “iris.” The

lines are presented in a state of digestion, words disarticulated and recombined.

“I Nossis stand by this. Nothing is sweeter than love. Everything desirable I state that love is sweet is second to it. I spit even honey from my mouth. if you think otherwise Nossis says this: The one who has never been loved by Aphrodite, assert what beauty that woman does not know what sort of flowers roses are. or what charm (Gutzwiller 76) after the charm of love, retains its grace? Nothing is sweeter than Eros. All other delights hold second place—I spit out from my mouth even honey. “Honey,” you say: Nossis declares this: whoever Cypris has not loved does not know honey? I say “I spit what sort of blossoms her roses are honey out of my mouth: (Snyder 77) nothing is second-best after the sweet of Eros.”

I Nossis stand and state that he whom Love neglects has naught, no flower, no grace, who lacks that rose, her kiss.”

Table 3.3

Gutzwiller tells us that 5.170 “is now generally accepted as the prooemium” for a poetry

collection Nossis is believed to have published, because “she names herself and makes

programmatic statements” (Poetic Garlands 75). Gutzwiller identifies Georg Luck, who post- dates Heliodora, as “apparently” first making this observation (75fn74). H.D., therefore, would not have known this theory, and yet chooses to bind 5.170 together with Meleager’s prooemium, signalling her recognition that, like 4.1, Nossis’ poem is an ars poetica poem. Gutzwiller reads

Nossis’ programmatic statement as defining herself against one of Hesiod’s, differentiating her poetics and poetic tradition from his, a recusatio that holds love lyric higher than heroic epic without shame. Here is the Hesiod, and Gutzwiller’s explanation:

Blest is the one whom the Muses

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love. Sweet song flows from his mouth. (Th 96-97)

Hesiod's "sweet song" becomes in a parallel passage "sweet dew upon the tongue" (Th.

83), which, through the common association of dew with honey, stands as the direct

antecedent of the "honey" that Nossis spits from her mouth. In her introductory

manifesto, then, Nossis rejects the inspiration of Hesiodic epic, so proudly maintained by

contemporary poets like Aratus and Callimachus, in favor of a tradition of more personal,

erotic verse. Nossis' substitution of Sappho for Hesiod as her primary archaic model is

indicated by the Sapphic character of the prooemium: the substitution of Aphrodite for

the Muse, the association of roses with poetic production. (76)

Instead of being like honey, Nossis’ verse is like flowers. Instead of flowing from the Muse, it flows from Aphrodite. The two epigrams H.D. combines in “Nossis” are both about where poetry comes from. Like “Heliodora,” “Nossis” suggests on one level that poetry spills out from individual genius and experience, but complicates that suggestion through irony and allusion.

But “Nossis” paints a more complicated picture of poetic origins than “Heliodora,” in which a beautiful object/girl catalyzes poetic genius. The erotic excitement (ostensibly) caused by “a girl” in “Heliodora” is replaced by excitement caused by a text, written by “a girl,” about erotic excitement, in “Nossis.” An Eros known through personal, literary experience is substituted for an Eros known through personal, sexual experience. Erotic love and whatever urge is behind poetry are inextricable (though not identical) in “Heliodora,” as they are in

“Nossis.” The interplay between the speaker and Meleager is undoubtedly supposed to feel erotic, and the responsive moves of Ergänzungsspiel, paradoxical endless game of completion, are like love games.

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H.D. expands Nossis’ epigram by exaggerating and elaborating on its awareness of itself

as part of a discourse about poetry, incorporating an imagined conversation into a translation

which has itself already been incorporated into the imagined conversation between Meleager and

the speaker: “Honey,” you say: / honey? I say “I spit / honey out of my mouth” (l-l 68-70). While the latter phrase in quotation marks is an adequate translation from 5.170, the first part is not, but is reminiscent of the back-and-forth in “Heliodora,” in which an interlocutor makes a suggestion that the poet-creator rejects, but builds on or against.

“Note” and “Lais”

Heliodora begins with a “Note” from the author, which explains that “The poem Lais has in italics a translation of the Plato epigram in the Greek Anthology. Heliodora has in italics the two Meleager epigrams from the Anthology. In Nossis is the translation of the opening lines of the Garland of Meleager and the poem of Nossis herself in the Greek Anthology” (CP 147).

Compared to Sea Garden, which effaces its citational gestures, Heliodora’s note signals a desire to acknowledge sources. In this way, the speaker of the note is similar to the speaker of

“Heliodora,” scrupulously giving credit where credit is due. But also like that speaker’s, this one’s attributions are deceptive; as we have seen, the translated elements do not stay neatly within italics, and what is present in italics is both more and less than translation. The most egregious example is in the first noted poem, “Lais,” the latter half of which I include below alongside scholarly translations of 6.1. 6.1 is noted for its ability to convey Lais’ beauty and decline without describing either state (Ypsilanti 193-194), and while “Lais,” perhaps in the spirit of Ergänzungsspiel, supplies or supplements the missing descriptions, citing “white feature of perfect marble,” it maintains 6.1’s refusal to describe Lais’ present aged state, describing it

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only with the deictic “this” in the final line and “other than” the perfect white marble face in the

penultimate stanza, to a similarly poignant effect.

Lais, exultant, tyrannizing Greece, I, Lais, whose haughty beauty made mock of Lais who kept her lovers in the porch, Greece, I who once had a swarm of young lovers lover on lover waiting at my doors, dedicate my mirror to Aphrodite, (but to creep since I wish not to look on myself as I am, and where the robe brushed the threshold cannot look on myself as I once was. where still sleeps Lais), so she creeps, Lais, I Lais who laughed exultant over Greece, I who to lay her mirror at the feet held that swarm of young lovers in my porches, of her who reigns in Paphos. lay my mirror before the Paphian; since such as I am I will not see myself, and such as I was I Lais has left her mirror, cannot. (Mackail 37) for she sees no longer in its depth the Lais’ self that laughed exultant, tyrannizing Greece.

Lais has left her mirror, for she weeps no longer, finding in its depth a face, but other than dark flame and white feature of perfect marble.

Lais has left her mirror (so one wrote) to her who reigns in Paphos; Lais who laughed a tyrant over Greece, Lais who turned the lovers from the porch, that swarm for whom now Lais has no use; Lais is now no lover of the glass, seeing no more the face as once it was, wishing to see that face and finding this. (l- l 28-58) Table 3.4

Poem 6.1 is structured such that Lais’ desire (ethelō/ I wish) and her power or ability (dynamai/ I can) are opposed as the present is to the past, with as uncrossable a gulf between them. We are

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invited to find in “Lais” a classical reception analogy in the epigram’s reflection of the present

looking at its storied past, the painful misalignment of time and desire, the shamed nostalgia, the

belatedness, that has haunted some classical reception. The final “this” refers on one level the

poem itself, “Lais,” in which an ancient poem of extreme economy and intricacy unravels, as if

to parallel the great beauty’s decline. The harder the poet tries to capture the original, through

experimenting with vocabulary and word-order, the further she gets from its concision. The desire on the part of the poet, represented through the many attempts to find the right line in the stanzas before the italicized one, may be as Lais’ desire in 6.1: temporally misaligned with her power or ability. If this is an analogy for classical reception, it is hard to see how it is a progressive one that challenges the maligned and unproductive nostalgia.

And yet, H.D.’s version hints that Lais, being done with her mirror, weeping no more,

might find some more sophisticated mimetic and reflective practices. Consider the ambiguity

created in the lines “Lais who turned the lovers from the porch / that swarm for whom now / Lais

has no use,” which might mean that Lais has no use-value to the lovers, but might also mean she has no use for them in the sense that they have no use-value any longer for her. That the wobbling Lais, hovering between subject and object, is like the barely-defensible “her who walks in Paphos” in terms of making subject-object distinctions ambiguous. Additionally, “use” is a complicated term in H.D., and her poems often celebrate what some might find useless.

Similarly, Lais’ repetition of her name, which serves to avoid pronominal ambiguities exploited earlier in the poem, where “she” might be the Paphian (Aphrodite) or Lais, does not have to be read as compulsive and temporizing, but can instead be seen as an exercise in copia.

Italics, says the author’s note, signal translation. The suggestion that this is where the translation begins is disingenuous, though, since significant percentages of the three preceding

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stanzas are words and phrases translated from 6.1. This would be obvious to any readers of the

final stanza, since they have been told it’s a translation and it repeats and varies earlier lines; the

poem is clearly intended to evoke questions about the boundaries of translation, variation, and

authorship.

For example, the epigram’s first clause, ē sobaron gelasasa kath’ Ellados (“who laughed

haughty down on Greece”), “Lais” offers three variations: “Lais, exultant, tyrannizing Greece”;

“the Lais’ self / that laughed exultant, / tyrannizing Greece”; and finally, the version that appears

in the named translation: “Lais who laughed a tyrant over Greece.” Are the first two excerpts

from the translator’s notebook? I sometimes produce translation notes or glosses that resemble

some of the things H.D. has done here, including producing / trying out multiple configurations

for clauses and untangling complex sentence structures by making separated clauses for each

thing predicated of the subject. Here is a sense of thwartedness, the ancient economy no longer

possible, but also a strategy of disarticulation-as-suspension: she disentangled the complicated

Greek, in which Lais is only named once. From the more complicated syntax of the original,

H.D. crafts several simpler lines. This leads to a mantra-like repetition, with a meditative pleasure, a time-slowing attention to the original epigram. Indicating the inherent impossibilities of translation, H.D.’s rendering shows the electron cloud of possibilities, of English almost- equivalents, that emanate from the couplet’s first line. Her “translation” refuses to choose one, and the hovering variants overspill the bounds of epigram and become the excesses of lyric.

Conclusion

“Heliodora” and “Nossis” are the fourth and sixth poems in Heliodora. These two

Meleager dialogues are separated (or joined) by the fifth, “Helen.” In contrast to “Nossis” and

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“Heliodora,” “Helen” is short and restrained. It ends with the melancholy note that Greece could love Helen “only if she were laid, / white ash amid funereal cypresses.”

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

where she stands,

and the white hands.

All Greece reviles

the wan face when she smiles,

hating it deeper still

when it grows wan and white,

remembering past enchantments

and past ills.

Greece sees unmoved,

God’s daughter, born of love,

the beauty of cool feet

and slenderest knees,

could love indeed the maid,

only if she were laid,

white ash amid funereal cypresses.

Lacking any obvious epigrammatic intertexts, “Helen” engages the Troy myth not through classical poems, but earlier poems of classical reception, Edgar Allan Poe’s two poems titled “To

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Helen.” “All Greece hates / the still eyes in the white face,” “Helen” begins. The “still eyes”

allude to the longer Poe poem, in which Helen’s eyes persist like a raven (“Only thine eyes

remained —they would not go, they never yet have gone”), haunting the speaker through the end

of the poem: “I see them still — two sweetly scintillant / Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!”

(l-l). Helen, “clad all in white,” is associated with the moon in this “To Helen,” which takes place, like H.D.’s “Nossis,” in an “enchanted,” moonlit garden. H.D.’s “Helen,” her face “wan

and white,” is also moon-like.

The first “To Helen,” shorter and better known, is almost a parody of romantic, nostalgic,

classical reception, as its second stanza demonstrates:

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

To the glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.

Poe’s speaker identifies “home” with Western antiquity, reinforcing it as an origin.

In Psyche Reborn, Susan Stanford Friedman notes that

Like Edgar Allan Poe’s poem about Helen, this poem draws a portrait with careful

references to Helen’s eyes, face, hands, feet, and knees. But in contrast to Poe’s poem,

H.D.’s Helen does not stand alone, unveiled before the adoring eyes of the male poet.

Instead, she is accompanied by a hate-filled gaze that never leaves the beauty of her

body. . . . What seems to be an adoration of woman, H.D. says, is rooted in reality in a

hatred for the living woman who has the capacity to speak for herself. (232-5)

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Poe’s presence is relevant here because of his own stated compositional strategy of writing about beautiful dead women. H.D.’s placement of it among garland poems is its own act of creative juxtaposition “Helen” is what comes in between “Heliodora”—name of a woman as inspiring object—and “Nossis”—name of a woman as inspiring subject.

Thirty years after Heliodora, H.D. writes a new Helen in the epic-length Helen in Egypt.

Though her later work does not explicitly cite epigrams, it is still trying to unify and perpetuate a tradition of classical reception that favors experimentation with citation and allusion, and for which the Anthology provides a model or analogy.

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CONCLUSION: THE ANTHOLOGY OF HELEN

Argument

Eileen Gregory and Leah Flack have both done important readings of Helen in Egypt in classical reception terms; that is, they look at Helen in Egypt alongside classical sources to which it alludes, and consider not just how the classics influence the new work, but how the new work influences the classics. Both use a single author approach: Gregory focuses on Helen in Egypt’s engagement with Euripides, while Flack focuses on its engagement with Homer. Though necessary and vital, their focus on the influence of a single author makes it hard to fully appreciation this text’s anthological syncretism, its most dextrous achievement of classical reception. As Ralph Hexter observes,

a concern here [in classical reception studies] is that by revisiting . . . the reception

traditions of classical literature . . . author by author, . . . we are deepening channels and

fortifying ways of thinking we ought rather to be conceiving as temporary assemblages

that should give way to yet other imaginary constructions. (29)

Since Gregory and Flack have usefully done much of the work of making connections between

Euripides and Homer, respectively, and Helen in Egypt, I propose an “anthological” approach.

Here I look at several smaller influential texts within the Trojan War tradition to show how they are implicated in H.D.’s epic, and bear on the meaning of Helen in Egypt just as it bears on theirs. Helen in Egypt has an anthological unity that depends for cohesion on allusions and abundant repetition with sometimes very small variation: it has integrity, yet also a marked sense of contingency and unfinishedness. In it we can see the influence of epigram on H.D.’s conception of lyric poetry, as well as in her presentation of rebirth as rededication.

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Helen in Egypt orients the classical-reception poetic tradition towards dissemination and revision. It boldly reckons with the problematic elements of poetry, especially epic and lyric. A sensitive reader of Homer can come away from either epic feeling the horror and irrationality of war, but also its inevitability and the glamour of the men who, like thousands of Iphigenias, died with honor, glory, and for no reason at all—for the delusions of a few powerful men or gods.

Such a reader may even feel that, even if thousands of people died a really long time ago, it was worth it to have Achilles, to have the Iliad. This aestheticization of war is problematic, and would seem especially so in the 1950s, when Helen in Egypt was composed. How far is the sensitive reader from thinking the Holocaust was worth Paul Celan? A wise person might say we’ve gone astray in making such equations, but H.D. recognizes that this is Homer’s equation—and Helen’s as well: she is the beauty that launched a thousand ships, and, here as elsewhere, Helen represents poetry. Are the energies actualized by poetry that treats of war ultimately complicit in, or even parasitic on, violence and suffering? Helen in Egypt is not afraid to face the question, even puts it as barbarically as possible: “Is it possible that it all happened the ruin—it would seem not only of Troy, but of the “holocaust of the Greeks,” . . . —in order that two souls or two soul-mates should meet? It almost seems so” (5).

Yet in the end, Helen in Egypt is an anti-war epic that argues the necessity of poetry in the aftermath of war, but also warns that poetry is in need of perpetual rebirth or rededication, and cyclically repeating periods of self-interrogation, so as not to turn backwards toward violent death.

The Story

Helen in Egypt begins “We all know the story of Helen of Troy,” which, given the story’s presence in pop culture as well as academia, is probably not too much of a presumption. But we

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all know it a little differently. It is a myth, and so many variants exist. Hence it will be helpful to

briefly run through the story as it appears in Helen in Egypt. We can start with an excerpt from

the middle of H.D.’s epic:

Was is Paris who caused the war?

or was it Thetis? the goddess

married a mortal, Peleus;

the banquet, the wedding-feast

lacked nothing, only one uninvited guest,

Eris; so the apple was cast,

so the immortals woke to petty strife

over the challenge, to the fairest. (111)

The wedding of Thetis and Peleus (Achilles’ parents) is crashed by Eris, uninvited goddess of discord, who throws in an apple marked “for the fairest,” which the goddesses Athena, Hera, and

Aphrodite all think is for them. The Trojan shepherd-prince Paris is asked to judge; he chooses

Aphrodite, and in return she “gives” him Helen of Sparta, the most beautiful woman, already married to Menelaus. Paris brings Helen to Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon raise a

Pan-Hellenic army and bring war to Troy to get Helen back. The fight goes on for ten years; in the end the Greeks win with their Trojan Horse ruse. The Greeks, with plenty of trouble, go back home. Achilles dies after being shot in the heel by Paris; Paris himself is killed by an arrow later;

Helen and Menelaus go back to Sparta.

Thetis, Achilles, and Paris all play important roles in Helen in Egypt, which is in large part the story of the union of Helen and Achilles after Achilles’ death by Paris’ arrow. In the

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Odyssey, we meet Achilles in the underworld, and he tells us that he’d rather live as a slave than be dead, precisely reversing his mortal stance, wherein he chose a short life of glory over a long life in obscurity. But outside of Homer, some versions of his afterlife bring him to Leuké, “the

White Island,” an Isle of the Blest where a married Helen and Achilles, along with other Trojan

War heroes, play out afterlives. Pausanias gives us one example of this version:

A story too I will tell which I know the people of Crotona tell about Helen. The people

of Himera too agree with this account. In the Euxine at the mouths of the Ister is an island

sacred to Achilles. It is called White Island . . . The first to sail thither legend says was

Leonymus of Crotona. . . . he was wounded in the breast, and weak with his hurt came to

Delphi. When he arrived the Pythian priestess sent Leonymus to White Island, telling him

that there Ajax would appear to him and cure his wound. In time he was healed and

returned from White Island, where, he used to declare, he saw Achilles, as well as Ajax

the son of Oileus and Ajax the son of Telamon. With them, he said, were Patroclus and

Antilochus; Helen was wedded to Achilles, and had bidden him sail to Stesichorus at

Himera, and announce that the loss of his sight was caused by her wrath. (Pausanias,

3.19.11-3.19.13)

Helen in Egypt’s Helen finds an Achilles similar to this one: an Achilles after the arrow.

The Stesichorus to which Pausanius alludes will be important to H.D.’s revision.

Euripides’ play Helen (412 BCE) offers the most famous version of a variant of the

Trojan War story in which what Paris stole away from Sparta was not really Helen but her eidolon: an image or phantom. The first Helen lives out the Trojan War years safe and chaste in

Egypt. Menelaus shipwrecks there on the way back from Troy, and together they make it safely back to Greece. The eidolon in Euripides’ play is never suggested to be on stage; when Menelaus

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and his men shipwreck there, they put the eidolon—Helen, to them—in a cave; later, when Helen

has convinced Menelaus that she is in fact the real Helen and has been in Egypt the whole time, a

messenger runs in to say the eidolon has disappeared; it has served its purpose. We are not meant

to worry about where the eidolon goes; it simply vanishes. And yet part of what makes this spin-

off of the Helen story so compelling is that it implies that the Helen of at least the Iliad and

Euripides’ earlier tragedies was in fact an imposter, not-Helen, or a different Helen who beguiled

ambiguously, who took action, who had sex, who wove, who mourned, who sent mixed signals

about her allegiance. But in Helen, the eidolon is treated as insubstantial. The emptiness of

Euripides’ eidolon leaves readers free to speculate: does the Helen phantom have Helen’s

memories? Does she know she is a double? Does she struggle for integrity like the rest of us?

What would her search look like?

A new text can enter the tradition more like an eidolon than like a child. It will still have

a relationship to the original’s family, but a far less set one. This radically free reception of a

classical figure, Helen, challenges what her disposable qualities are, and what are her sticking

points. It is not the new chaste Helen whom H.D. had her eye on, but the eidolon, hollow

troublemaker, made of clouds and blame. Might she have rights and meanings? Is it not she who

is truly free? No incest and no ancestry— created horizontally. If chaste Penelope can be

translated as Molly Bloom, what might Helen become? H.D. would paint the name HELEN over

the name HOMER, making “Helen” the proper name for the literary entity comprised of stories

about Troy. Her Helen begins as the eidolon Helen, left ungrounded and free by Euripides.

Helen in Egypt: Structure

H.D. referred to Helen in Egypt as an epic, as do most of its readers. However, it is not in dactylic hexameter, or any regular meter, and it is less narrative than most epics. Its organization

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is marked by H.D.’s signature trilogizing; its table of contents is more complicated than a simple list of chapters or cantos:

Figure 1

As shown in Figure 1, there are three main sections: “Pallinode,” “Leuké,” and “Eidolon,” which are composed of seven, seven, and six books, respectively. Each book contains eight short lyric poems in small tercets, with four to a dozen stanzas. Each poem is numbered and prefaced by a prose caption5. Consequently, Helen in Egypt is 160 lyric poems, each with its own caption, divided into groups of 8, then 7 or 6, then 3. Helen is the predominant speaker in the poems, but

Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and “an eidolon or image of Thetis” also have some lyric lines. The

5 “Caption” is H.D.’s term for these headnotes, which I adopt, liking the way it casts the lyrics as images.

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prose captions were not included in the earliest version of the poems; Susan Barbour cites “an important letter H.D. wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson on 3 Feb 55” which “reveals that she decided to include the prose segments after she had visited a nearby recording studio where she had made the spontaneous decision to give brief introductions to the poems” (468). The prose speaker is grafted onto the lyric poems, making her a glosser or captioner who serves as a guide and searches the text of the poems the way the poems’ speaker searches or tries to decipher the

“text” of her world.

Tension Between Epic and Lyric

Because there is so much allusion to drama, especially to Euripides’ Helen, we might consider the three major sections “acts”; each seems to take place in a different location. For

Barbour, for example, Helen in Egypt “projects the finished unity of an Attic drama” (486).

Within the poem, though, drama seems mainly important as a stage or battlefield on which epic and lyric tropes and strategies spar. Even Gregory, who strongly emphasizes the Euripidean subtext, nonetheless reminds us of

H.D.’s peculiar poetic slant, her primary emphasis on the “choros sequence” and her

translation of Euripides’ Ion into lyric rather than dramatic terms. Helen in Egypt may be

understood as an extended and greatly amplified choros sequence, in H.D.’s distinct

invention of that form. (222)

Gregory suggests that understanding H.D.’s relationship with Greek chorus is primarily important for the understanding it gives us of her treatment of lyric: “A greatly amplified choros sequence” is more like a collection of lyric poems, formally, than it is like a drama. And yet H.D. treats epic themes—especially, as Flack notes, the nostos (return or homecoming) theme made

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famous by Odysseus—and characters and claims a greater unity for her book than that of a

collection of poems, even an intricately-organized one like Sea Garden. Flack suggests that

H.D. uses Helen to write a self-conscious epic that subverts that epic form from within to

mount a defense for lyric poetry both as a way of claiming authority in a tradition that

might have denied her epic ambition and as a way of emphasizing that epic and lyric need

not remain fundamentally irreconcilable forms of expression. (182)

My comparative reading, which considers Stesichorus’ Palinode, a lyric of Sappho’s, and a resonance from a non-Homeric epic, strengthens Flack’s argument that Helen in Egypt is concerned with genre questions and attempts a reconciliation of lyric and epic. However, it is not only that H.D. uses lyric to counter epic’s problems; she also uses epic to remediate lyric, to show that lyric can handle martial matters. Investigating its subtler allusions and minor points of intersection with texts within the tradition demonstrates that Helen in Egypt succeeds in making the existing tradition sing anew.

It also demonstrates that the reader is implicated in the production process: asked to stop, reflect, consult sources, and if they cannot be found, to produce them (to play the

Erganzungspiel). This implication makes the “text” of Helen in Egypt closer to Helen-in-Egypt- and-its-sources, a malleable anthology that binds epic and lyric. As Flack notes, “H.D.'s epic reminds us that literary history might have proceeded (and might still proceed) differently outside of the organizing frameworks we usually employ to classify and interpret literature”

(181). Epic, lyric, and drama all come into play in Helen in Egypt, which brings the genres together while retaining their contrasts, as an anthology might.

Setting the Stage

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Helen herself stands for neither lyric nor epic, but rather grafts them together or includes both of them; she is poetry, and, at the beginning of Helen in Egypt, she needs revitalization, rebirth. As I have argued, we can see her as the eidolon-Helen Euripides leaves behind, vanishing from its Egyptian beach to reappear on the same Egyptian beach in a slightly different dimension. This is where “Pallinode” takes her up: waiting to see what will happen next. This is the beginning of the first poem of “Pallinode,” coming under the first prose caption:

Do not despair, the hosts

surging beneath the Walls,

(no more than I) are ghosts;

do not bewail the Fall,

the scene is empty and I am alone,

yet in this Amen-temple,

I hear their voices,

there is no veil between us,

only space and leisure

and long corridors of lotus-bud

furled on the pillars,

and the lotus-flower unfurled (1-2)

“Do not despair,” she says, “do not bewail the Fall [of Troy]”; this is what Helen assumes that we, like the audience of epic or tragedy, have been preparing to do. In very few traditions is it suitable to trust a speaker who immediately says not to worry. From the start, Helen deals in the ambiguity that those who have studied her say is a defining characteristic (Austin 10), implying

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simultaneous that she is and is not a ghost. She addresses us like the prologue-speaker in a tragedy, who orients the audience. But her orientation of us could be more precise. A ghostly or shadow Troy, aswarm with warriors, has been palimpsested onto this Egyptian beach with its

“Amen-temple”—they can’t touch us, but she can hear them. Her speech if full of contradictions:

“there is no veil between us,” but “I am alone”; “the scene is empty,” but there are corridors and pillars and, with their furling and unfurling, also lotuses, whose presence in this odyssey sets us on guard. It is as though a page of Homer has been palimpsested onto a page of Euripides; Helen speaks from the Euripides page, or its margin, as though she speaks also in a marginal note wondering what the Helen-eidolon might be capable of. The Helen-eidolon wonders what she has to do with these others.

Songs Re-sung

The prose caption to the this first poem in Helen in Egypt explicitly locates it in a specific revisionary tradition:

We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt.

How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode, was the first to tell us. Some

centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck

blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he

reinstated her in his Pallinode. Euripides, notably in The Trojan Women, reviles her, but

he [Euripides] also is “restored to sight.” The later, little understood Helen in Egypt, is

again a Pallinode, a defence, explanation or apology.

According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She had been transposed or

translated from Greece in Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real

Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion. (1)

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Plato’s Socrates cites three lines of the Palinode in the Phaedrus dialogue, along with a relevant story about it, as Flack mentions:

That Stesichorus's Palinode has been lost except for the fragment that appears in the

Phaedrus would certainly have appealed to the underpublished H.D. as a model of a

dormant countertradition on the verge of annihilation that nevertheless retains a kind of

latent, unrealized power. (180)

Flack’s description highlights the similarities between this text with “latent, unrealized power” that is “on the verge of annihilation” and early H.D. images like the sea flowers. And, though small, the fragment is striking:

The story [logos] is not true.

You did not board the well-benched ships,

You did not reach the towers of Troy.

Helen in Egypt makes use of similar diction early in the first book:

Alas, my brothers,

Helen did not walk

upon the ramparts, (5)

Helen speaks with the flatly reversing tone of Stesichorus and keeps the traditional reference to

Troy’s towers, which often stand for it metonymically (even though they fell!). And, just as

Stesichorus’ fragment alludes to the number of men killed at Troy (or on the way there, or on the way back) by describing the ships as “well-benched,” Helen addresses the host of departed souls,

“my brothers.” They remind us of the terrible implication of the eidolon-revision: the war was fought for no reason, the deaths were in vain. Euripides, like H.D., wrote during a century in which wars had begun to seem out of proportion; both authors are well-interpreted as anti-war

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poets, and we are supposed to realize the irony that to have shed all that blood for a woman is not so different than to have shed it for a phantom — that the real reason men go to war is something different: “so they fought, forgetting women, / hero to hero, sworn brother and lover, / and cursing Helen through eternity” (4).

The fragment’s context in the Phaedrus further illuminates H.D.’s own palinode. This fragment surfacing here is analogous to the unearthed epigram in Bing’s fable of reception:

Socrates plays Erganzungsspiel with the scrap of Stesichorus, which reminds us that classical poetry comes down and across and through texts on the margin of literature, like Platonic dialogues. Norman Austin contextualizes this process this way:

Plato’s story of the Palinode occurs in the Phaedrus (243a) when Socrates has just

completed his speech in praise of the nonlover . . . . Now, suddenly repentant, as if

coming to his senses, Socrates confesses that he has committed a grave error in speaking

in a derogatory way about Eros, in his view one of the greatest of the daimones mediating

between the gods in their bliss and our less-than-blissful world.

There is an ancient purification for those who err in telling sacred stories

[mythologia], which Homer did not know, but Stesichorus did. For, being

deprived of his eyesight for accusing Helen, Stesichorus, unlike Homer, did not

remain in ignorance. Being musical [mousikos, “gifted by the Muses”], he

recognized the cause. Whereupon he composed the so-called Palinode. (95)

As Austin’s citation shows, Socrates cites the Stesichorus story as a precedent to his own reversal. He should be appearing vulnerable, admitting he has made a mistake. But this humility is ironic. Unlike the Pausanius version, in Socrates’ Stesichorus is not alerted to his error by a messenger from Leuké, but recognizes it himself. Just as Stesichorus erred, but we are supposed

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to admire his ability to diagnose and remedy his blindness, Socrates’ initial error will only lead

to later triumph. Socrates’ anecdote about Homer, Stesichorus, and Helen shows textual

transmission to be a process that oscillates between excavation and palimpsest, working toward a

unity that seems alternately revelation and a re-layering of figures. Barely existing, and absent the poem it recants, the Palinode in Plato “palinodes” the Iliad in two ways: suggesting not only

that it mistakes the eidolon for the real thing, but also that its Homer’s own anecdotal blindness

was caused by that mistake. An upending innovation, the creation of the Helen in Egypt myth, is

rhetorically crafted to seem a revelation of what was true all along. DuPlessis has something like

this irony in mind when she comments that H.D. tries “to reconstruct not so much a new Helen,

but the oldest and ‘therefore’ truest Helen” (Career 108). By letting Helen interact with

Stesichorus and Homer, Socrates’ story brings the authors onto the same mythic ground as their subject matter; H.D. continues this tradition by suggesting in her opening caption that Euripides similarly considered his work a “restor[ation] to sight,” a palinode for earlier plays of his in which “he reviles [Helen].” The initial caption makes it seem as though H.D., too, earlier presented false Helens. H.D. recognizes the tradition as comprised not only of literary texts, but of literary texts with writing in the margins—and with stories in those margins about the stories they sometimes manage to marginalize.

On the Desolate Beach

Achilles and Helen meet on a beach like those in Sea Garden, and Helen’s unfolding knowledge is of the sort Nathaniel Mackey calls “coastal”: “The “desolate coast” on which

Helen and Achilles meet in Helen in Egypt poses coastal knowledge as dissolute knowledge, repetitive, compulsive knowledge, undulatory, repeatedly undone and reconstituted” (228).

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Because this is a palinode, a song of repurposing, the main characters Achilles and Helen have to

undergo something like what the flowers of Sea Garden did: rebirth through the stripping away

of some attributes and new emphasis on others. They are denuded of some of their tell-tale attributes, but remain recognizable, enough themselves to merit their proper names.

How did we know each other?

was it the sea-enchantment in his eyes

of Thetis, his sea-mother?

what was the token given?

I was alone, bereft,

and wore no zone, no crown,

and he was shipwrecked,

drifting without chart,

famished and tempest-driven (7)

Both Achilles and Helen are described in terms of what they don’t have; this is part of this section’s ethos of reversal. “But this Helen is not to be recognized by earthly splendour nor this

Achilles by accoutrements of valour. It is the lost legions that have conditioned their encounter, and ‘the sea-enchantment in his eyes’” (7). H.D.’s old trope of championing the liminal and sea- wracked is now linked to the reversing gesture of the palinode.

The Egypt of “Pallinode,” Helen in Egypt’s first section, in fact, is explicitly a place of reversals. In an early scene in which Helen recognizes Achilles by the arrow-wound in his heel, reversal is asserted first in prose caption and then in the lyric.

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Here, values are reversed, a mortal after death may have immortality conferred upon

him. But Achilles in life, in legend, is already immortal—in life, he is invincible, the hero-

god. What is left for him after death? (The Achilles-heel).

This was the token, his mortality;

immortality and victory, were dissolved;

I am no more immortal,

I am man among the millions,

no hero-god among the Myrmidons;

some said a bowman from the Walls

let fly the dart, some said it was Apollo,

but I, Helena, know it was Love’s arrow. (9)

While there are conflicting accounts of Achilles’ death, they concur that he was killed by arrow

shot by Paris and/or Apollo. Nowhere is Love the culprit. Helen’s secret knowledge of the arrow

as Love’s arrow is at the center of this overall reversal, in which life after death, for Achilles,

represents a chance to be mortal, to not be fully determined as the “hero of Troy.” What is Helen,

what is Achilles, minus (or outside of) that defining characteristic? For just as the eidolon revision prompts us to wonder what Helen might be besides or if not the destroyer of Troy, so

does H.D.’s Helen in Egypt prompt us to wonder the same for Achilles. H.D.’s Achilles is free to

do new things; he can have adventures after Troy, participate in new scenes that do not undo the

old ones, but that might change the way we look at them, or even replace some.

God's plan is other than the priests disclose;

I did not know why

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(in dream or in trance)

God had summoned me hither,

until I saw the dim outline

grown clearer,

as the new Mortal,

shedding his glory,

limped slowly across the sand. (10)

Helen’s vision gets clearer, both in the sense that she can more clearly see the figure coming

towards her and in the sense that she can more clearly apprehend her situation and the drama that

is about to unfold, what she calls “God’s plan.” Like Stesichorus, she promises the revelation of

a hidden truth. The allusion to Stesichorus is not just to the Palinode, but to its myth of

transmission. The figure of Stesichorus wavers between history and myth, both a historical

author like Euripides and a fictional one like Homer’s Helen, who weaves stories of the Trojan

War in a tapestry in Iliad’s book 3 and tells war stories to Telemachus in book 4 of the Odyssey.

Disarming

In this version, Achilles was shot at Troy while mesmerized by the fluttering of Helen of

Troy’s scarf on the rampart. After he is shot, he finds himself on the same “desolate beach” as our Helen. Their union is the active element meant to give birth to a new, revised form of long poem that incorporates elements of lyric and epic. However, their relationship is consummated in ellipses. When he first meets Helen, he doesn’t recognize her, and they huddle together around a beach-fire. When he does recognize her, he becomes violent and tries to strangle her . . . but they end up “under his cloak” together.

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O Thetis, O sea-mother

I prayed, as he clutched my throat

with his fingers' remorseless steel,

let me go out, let me forget,

let me be lost . . .

O Thetis, O sea-mother, I prayed under his cloak,

let me remember, let me remember,

forever, this Star in the night. (17)

Helen’s ability to transform bloodlust into sexual lust is part of her traditional character. In a famous scene depicted on black-figure pottery, Menelaus is shown charging toward Helen to kill her, but dropping his sword because even as he runs toward her, he is melting, forgiving her, wanting her back. The amphora in Figure 2, by the Altamura Painter, shows such an image; it has been part of the British Museum collection since 1847 (“Amphora”), so H.D. may even have seen it there.

Figure 2 Like the Altamura Painter’s Menelaus, H.D.’s Achilles turns from violent to sexual passion in an instant. However, Achilles’ disarming in Helen in Egypt is attributed not only to Helen’s

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desirability; as the captioner notes, “It is the lost legions that have conditioned their encounter, and ‘the sea-enchantment in his eyes’” (7). “The sea-enchantment in his eyes” is the inheritance from his sea-goddess mother, so what “conditions their encounter” is the dead Greeks and Thetis.

The Thetis of Helen in Egypt is not the unwilling bride of Homer (Il.18.434). She seems to come from Euripides. In Euripides’ Andromache, Andromache seeks supplication at Thetis’ temple in the beginning, and then Thetis herself comes to do the deus ex machina work at the end, including granting Achilles’ father Peleus immortality, telling him that the “waves of the sea will not wet your feet as you step out to watch our beloved son, Achilles, on the shores of the island of Leuké in the Euxine sea" (l. 1260-1262). Andromache’s Thetis is a powerful one, whose designs match her outer reality.

It is Thetis to whom Helen prays when Achilles threatens her, suggesting that her intervention has helped flip him from hate to love. It would not be the first time in the tradition that a hero has been about to kill Helen, but is turned from doing so by the intervention of the hero’s goddess mother. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas tells of his encounter with Helen during the sack of Troy.

“. . .

and then I saw her, clinging to Vesta’s threshold,

hiding in silence, tucked away—Helen of Argos.

Glare of the fires lit my view as I looked down,

scanning the city left and right, and there she was . . .

terrified of the Trojans’ hate, now Troy was overpowered,

terrified of the Greeks’ revenge, her deserted husband’s rage—

that universal Fury, a curse to Troy and her native land

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and here she lurked, skulking, a thing of loathing

cowering at the alter: Helen. Out it flared,

the fire inside my soul, my rage ablaze to avenge

our fallen country—pay Helen back, crime for crime.

“ ‘So, this woman,’ it struck me now, ‘safe and sound

She’ll look once more on Sparta, her native Greece?

She’ll ride like a queen in triumph with her trophies?

Feast her eyes on her husband, parents, children, too?

Her retinue fawning round her, Phrygian ladies, slaves?

That—with Priam put to the sword? And Troy up in flames?

And time and again our Dardan shores have sweated blood? (2.704-21; Kline translation)

This representation of Helen, though later, is one Stesichorus’ and Euripides’ revision reverses completely. Aeneas is not a bit enchanted, and she is completely powerless, a “thing.” But Helen from an Augustan perspective is still Helen: as a shared curse (“a curse to Troy and her native land”), she binds the Trojans and Greeks, makes them speak as one. Like Virgil’s “thing of loathing,” H.D.’s Helen is recognized by the hero in a vulnerable position, a flickering fire-light scene. H.D.’s Achilles, too, flies into a rage upon recognizing Helen; like Aeneas his rage is

“conditioned by” his dead comrades. "Helena, cursed of Greece, / I have seen you upon the ramparts,” he says before throttling her, “for you the ships burnt” (16-7). And, like H.D.’s

Achilles, Aeneas does not go through with it. After a few more lines excoriating Helen, Aeneas is interrupted by his mother, Venus (the Roman Aphrodite):

all of a sudden there my loving mother stood

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before my eyes, but I had never seen her so clearly,

her pure radiance shining down upon me through the night,

the goddess in all her glory, just as the gods behold

her build, her awesome beauty. Grasping my hand

she held me back, adding this from her rose-red lips:

. . . .

Think: it’s not that beauty, Helen, you should hate,

not even Paris, the man that you should blame, no,

it’s the gods, the ruthless gods who are tearing down

the wealth of Troy, her toppling crown of towers.

Look around. I’ll sweep it all away, the mist

so murky, dark, and swirling around you now,

it clouds your vision, dulls your mortal sight.

You are my son. Never fear my orders.

Never refuse to bow to my commands. (2.729-34, 2.744-52)

Aphrodite diverts Aeneas’ attention to the sights all around him of the gods literally destroying

Troy. Like Achilles will, he has a moment of clear vision, recognizing that the hatred war raises among people is folly. He will get over it quickly, but once H.D.’s Achilles has turned, he stays turned. In the final section, “Eidolon,” “He waits, not as Lord of Legions, “King of Myrmidons,” but as one dedicated to a new Command, that of the “royal sacred High Priest of love-rites”

(210).

The Lyric Swerve

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From Menelaus dropping his sword to Aeneas dropping his murderous intent, the

tradition provides examples of Helen situated on the threshold between war and love, between

epic and lyric. A similar example of rage turning to love comes from the chorus of Euripides’

Helen, who throughout the play likens Helen to Persephone: a woman abducted and taken to a strange land, with lots of suffering to follow. Persephone’s mother—Demeter, Cybele, or The

Great Mother—is full of grief and anger, with disastrous effects (because she is Mother Earth):

“She, / turned cruel by grief for her daughter, dried / the springs that gush from deep in the

ground, / and there were no jets of bright water” (1334-6). In the chorus’ telling, the Mother’s

grief is assuaged when Aphrodite substitutes her war-music with happier songs and

instruments:

. . . the loveliest

of the immortals took the death-

voice of bronze and the skin-strung drums:

Aphrodite. The goddess smiled

and drew into her hands

the deep sounding flute

in delight with its music. (1346-52)

Aphrodite’s role parallels the one she plays as Venus in the Aeneid. Here she is associated with lyric qualities, in contrast to “the death-voice of bronze and the skin-strung drums.” While

Achilles is associated with epic in Helen in Egypt, Paris is associated with lyric in the second section, “Leuké.” In “Leuké,” Helen recovers the memories of Helen of Troy, with the help of a

Freud-like Theseus.

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In Euripides’ version, the doubling of Helen was a multiplication, but it can be read as a division, a familiar madonna-whore division of woman into two unstable, reductive roles.

Euripides’ new Helen never transgressed; the eidolon is the scapegoat who takes all the sin onto herself. In Helen in Egypt, the Helen-eidolon speaker’s desire to find answers about herself suggests part of her was lost in a doubling of division, which was an attempt to separate, to divide out the bad or dangerous parts of beauty (because Helen is the most beautiful by definition) and leave a pure remainder. H.D.’s Helens seek unity; they need to be gathered together and re-membered, like the limbs of Osiris, a myth alluded to frequently in H.D.’s epic.

The new Helen who loves Achilles has to be reconciled with the Helen who loved Paris. Paris and Achilles loosely represent these reception-threatening flaws in lyric and epic traditions, respectively: lyrics’s ability to distract from war and justice, and epic’s rhetoric of war’s inevitability.

Priamel

Helen’s special, palinodic knowledge is expressed early in Helen in Egypt when she re- names the arrow that killed Achilles “Love’s arrow,” as we saw earlier.

some said a bowman from the Walls

let fly the dart, some said it was Apollo,

but I, Helena, know it was Love’s arrow. (9)

Towards the end of “Pallinode,” this stanza is repeated with a small difference:

some say a bowman from the Walls

let fly the dart, some say it was Apollo,

but I, Helena, know it was Love's arrow. (83)

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Now, instead of “some said,” we have “some say.” This tiny, epigram-level variation shows the variability of this alternate Egyptian timescape, but even more significant here is how differently these nearly-identical stanzas signify in their different locations. In its first iteration, we read it as

Helen’s palinode to the epic cycle’s version of Achilles’ death. The second iteration occurs after

Helen has been musing about her relationships to nearby mythic characters—mainly her sister

Clytemnestra and niece Iphigenia—and the different versions of their stories, including parallels

of their stories to her own. So when the priamel occurs again, instead of a gesture of reversal, it

becomes a statement on how myths exist as assemblages of simultaneous variations. When it

occurs a third time, in Leuké, during Helen in Egypt’s second section, we realize that the earlier

versions were marked by an absence.

they met, Hector and Achilles,

and Achilles slew Hector,

but later, a bowman from the Walls

let fly the dart;

some said it was Apollo,

but I, Helena, knew it was Love's arrow;

it was Love, it was Apollo, it was Paris;

I knew and I did not know this,

while I slept in Egypt. (112-3)

It seemed unlikely that any version of the Troy story would let Achilles die at the hands of an anonymous “bowman from the walls.” We now see that Helen had been repressing or was elsewise divided from the bowman’s identity: it was Paris.

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H.D.’s formulation about Love’s arrow is reminiscent of another important iteration of

Helen, in Sappho’s fragment 16:

Some men say an army of horse Some say a host of hersemen, others of infantry, and others and some men say an army on of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth: foot But I say, it is what you love and some men say an army of ships is the most beautiful thing Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all: for on the black earth. she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty, Helen, her But I say it is most noble husband what you love Easy to make this understood by Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a thought all. for For she who overcame everyone her daughter and dear parents. The [Cyprian goddess] led in beauty (Helen) her from the path . . . left her fine husband . . . [Which] now has put me in mind of Anactoria far Behind and went sailing to Troy. away: Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance Not for her children nor her dear of her changing face, would I rather see than your Lydian parents chariots and infantry full-armed. had she a thought, no— (Translated by D.L. Page, quoted in Gumpert 65) ]led her astray

]for ]lightly ]reminded me now of Anaktoria who is gone

I would rather see her lovely step and the motion of light on her face than chariots of Lydians or ranks of foot soldiers in arms (Carson 27-29) Table 4.1

Fragment 16 is easily read as recusatio, a defense of personal, lyric modes and erotic subject matter against public, epic modes with martial, political subject matter. Both the subjective or

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personal (“but I say it is whatever one loves”) and the ephemeral (“her lovely step,” “the motion of light on her face”) are praised. Helen is a liminal figure, both an epic and a lyric subject; here,

Sappho strengthens lyric’s hold on her. Evoking Helen as an extreme or hyperbolic example in order to express the beauty of the beloved will continue to be popular in lyric poetry through the

Renaissance (e.g., Ronsard’s “Quand vous êtes...”) and into modernity (e.g., Yeats’ “No Second

Troy”), and no one will be surprised to hear that examples of this trope occur in the Anthology.

Sappho’s Helen is in a similar position to that of the Graces of Meleager and Callimachus;

Anactoria parallels their Heliodoras and Berenices. Sappho’s poetry, like Meleager’s and

Callimachus’ centuries after, celebrates its own distinction even as it celebrates the distinction of its beloveds.

Anne Carson writes in the notes to her translation that “Sappho begins with a rhetorical device called a priamel, whose function is to focus attention and to praise. The priamel’s typical structure is a list of three items followed by a fourth that is different and better” (362). Fragment

16 demonstrates priamel’s potential to play a second idea off a first in a way that both binds and severs the two ideas. We must recognize and call up the beauty of martial things for Sappho’s priamel to work; subjective, personal lyric measures itself by them as far as it can (even though it is not far enough to measure itself fully). Beautiful here is evocative of a certain kind of pathos.

The opening lists, reminiscent of such lists in epic as the famous Catalogue of Ships, do evoke pathos; Caroline Alexander tells us that, far from being the most boring parts as they are to us, such catalogues may have been eagerly awaited by their first audiences, who would perhaps recognize place names and cheer for their home team, so to speak (n.p.).This reception is not available to us, but we can still wonder at the sheer number of men who fight and die and marvel at their weapons and transports. Certainly this pathos was available in H.D.’s lifetime. H.D.

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herself had captured well, in translating a chorus from Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis many years

previously, the excitement of women racing to see the Greek ships gathered at Aulis, a sight

striking for its numerousness, the multitudinous iterations with small variations, within which

each ant swarming among them is a living, breathing man, going off to get Helen back. This

feeling of sublimity— the dissolution of individuality into multiplicity—is what the Sappho

fragments suddenly compares to the feeling evoked by “what you love most,” which seems to

mean in this context whomever you love most, because for Sappho it is Anactoria. This is

Helen’s ratio: her face to a thousand ships. So Sappho’s fragment brings this ratio, associated

with epic sublimity, into contact with the more lyrically-sublime ratio of lover-poet to beloved.

Arrows and Eros

Archery, while certainly a valued skill, was also susceptible to accusations of cowardice,

because the shooter does not have to put himself at the same kind of risk as an attacker who uses

a sword or spear. Also, while an arrow is phallic enough, a bow—a delicate curve with a taut, quivering string—is practically a lute or lyre, a fitting enough weapon for Paris as well as for

Apollo, the archer and lyrist. The bow and arrow, like Helen, are signifiers at an intersection of lyric and epic, points where the genres meld and meet, and they seem not opposed, but urgently analogous. The weapons of war are also the weapons of Eros, so closely associated with lyric as to sometimes be indistinguishable from it.

Apollo and Aphrodite fought on the Trojan side. Apollo is supposed to have guided

Paris’ arrow. Yet Paris himself is scorned in most accounts for all the reasons lyric is: dangerous frivolity, soft, effeminate. And ultimately, H.D.’s Helen moves past him and onto her renovated

Achilles. Helen in Egypt’s portrayal of Paris suggests that being subject to ridicule and rejection is not incidental to lyric.

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what is Helen without the spears,

what is Love without arrows?

this—flickering of pine-cones,

this fragrance of pine-knots,

this small room,

no blaze of torches,

no trumpet-note, no clamour of war-gear,

this haven, this peace, this return,

Adonis and Cytheraea. (140)

The lyric recusatio pattern is familiar: the music of the small and subtle is held up against the

“trumpet-note” and “clamour of war-gear.” Associations between Paris, Apollo, and Love or

Eros ripple across “Leuké” and “Eidolon” and are clearly associated with lyric. One of the culminating lyric moments is the recovered memory of the moment of her seduction, back in

Sparta, before the war.

Sparta; autumn? summer?

the fragrant bough? fruit ripening

on a wall? the ships at anchor?

I had all that, everything,

my Lord's devotion, my child

prattling of a bird-nest,

playing with my work-basket;

140

the reels rolled to the floor

and she did not stoop to pick up

the scattered spools but stared

with wide eyes in a white face,

at a stranger—and stared at her mother,

a stranger—that was all,

I placed my foot on the last step

of the marble water-stair

and never looked back. (227-8)

Helen’s memory of looking away from her daughter Hermione, who has barely been mentioned, is as shocking as Paris was when he entered in “Leuké” after being repressed in “Pallinode.”

While Achilles recovers memories of his early love for his mother, Helen recovers the memory of being a mother and conveys its power through the image of the scared, abandoned little girl who watches her mother turn into a stranger (perhaps the moment she was swapped for the eidolon!). Achilles had been distracted from his love for his mother by “the lure of war”; for

Helen, it is a different lure: “Apollo’s snare.” While in the above lines Helen realizes what she gave up (for she has now been reconciled to the non-eidolon Helen) when she went with Paris, the next poem tells us what she got in return:

was Troy lost for a subtle chord,

a rhythm as yet un-heard,

was it Apollo's snare?

was Apollo passing there?

141

was a funeral-pyre to be built,

a holocaust of the Greeks,

because of a fluttering veil,

or because Apollo granted a lute-player,

a rhythm as yet unheard,

to challenge the trumpet-note? (229)

H.D. recalls the Great Mother chorus from Euripides’ Helen, in which Aphrodite soothes

Demeter by replacing her war drums with a delightful flute. Once again lyric marks a moment of distraction or enchantment, a change in tune.

Conclusion: Flipping the Arrow

In “Leuké,” the captioner remarks: “How reconcile Trojan and Greek? It is Helen's old and Helen's own problem. Truly, on Leuké, the dead must be reconciled, the slayer with the slain. Achilles? Paris? Trojan and Greek arrow alike, must be re-dedicated. For as Theseus says, we are "weary of War, only the Quest remains" (157). Though Theseus has been shown to be a Freudian figure, it is really the prose captioner who works in the language of self-analysis.6

Theseus himself, as the above quote suggests, is associated with quest romance, sharing

Achilles’ and Helen’s half-divinity, Theseus represents the hero of an earlier generation. Unlike

Achilles, heroes of the generation of Theseus, Hercules, and Jason were not remembered for

their magnificence in battle as much as for their adventures. They went on quests, slayed

dragons, performed trials. As Helen in Egypt tries to remediate poetry’s aestheticizations of

6 For Theseus as Freud in Helen in Egypt, see Friedman, Penelope’s Web, 302-303 and Duplessis, H.D.: The Career of that Struggle, 76.

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violence (epic) and solipsistic ahistoricism (lyric), it turns to alternate discourses (myth,

psychoanalysis, tragedy, romance) to poach strategies and shake off from epic and lyric from any

false dichotomies that exist between or within them. With the help of these discourses, Helen is

able to see that “Trojan and Greek arrow alike, must be re-dedicated.” The Trojan arrow is the arrow that kills Paris, which according to Sophocles was shot by Philoctetes using the bow of

Hercules; on Leuké, Paris tells Helen of his death. The Greek arrow is the arrow that kills

Achilles, that Helen knows is Love’s. In “Eidolon,” near the end, we see the re-dedication itself,

like a scene from the Greek Anthology:

it lies at her feet

with torn nets and the spears,

the fishing-nets and the chariot-staves,

mixed offerings of rich and poor,

of peace and of war;

I see the pitiful heap of little things,

the mountain of monstrous gear,

then both vanish, there is nothing,

nothing at all, a single arrow. (301-2)

The arrow momentarily replaces or stands in for the conventional dedicated objects, divided here into categories: “offerings of rich and poor, / of peace and of war.” This moment is a flash in which the dichotomies marking the collected items— female-associated nets/phallic staves and

spears; peace/war; wealth/poverty; big/small; pity/awe—are substituted out for the perplexing

simultaneity of nothing and a single arrow. Like Callimachus’ Berenice and Sappho’s Anactoria,

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the arrow is an item that changes the dynamics of the set, and it is itself changed by being set in

the place of these other items. The “pitiful heap” and “monstrous gear” need re-vision; the arrow comes and for a moment stands for all of those other things, a flexible object like Helen herself who can bear so many meanings and therefore bring about or disrupt so many unions. All this lies at her feet.

The her in this instance is Thetis, Achilles’ goddess mother. Earlier in “Eidolon,” before the re-dedication scene, we learn how Thetis is worshipped. Achilles remembers “the trick, the magic /of little things, how the reapers / brought his mother the gleanings //and not the sheaves”

(286). Exemplary gifts are “a filigree ring of no worth,” “a broken oar,” and “a snapped anchor-

chain” (280).

a man will wait hours on the wharf

for some chance unexpected thing,

the simple magic coming

from something lost or left over,

or spilled like the ash-of-myrrh

on the Paphos-temple floor,

which a simple servant (no priestess)

sweeps up to bring to another. (280)

Here again is the pattern of the secret beauty of small and broken things, things analogous to the

fragments of Stesichorus and Sappho as well as to epigrams and H.D.’s lyric. In contrast to

lavish dedicatory objects, this goddess wants “something lost or left over,” something “spilled,”

something to be re-dedicated by the next worshipper.

144

While the poems leading up to this one are definitely about Thetis, making it seem

natural that this one is too, references to Paphos make the described goddess a blend of Thetis

and Aphrodite. In Sea Garden, we saw H.D. treat of Aphrodite in her aspect as sea goddess, an

aspect she shares with Thetis. In Heliodora, Lais refers to Aphrodite as “the Paphian,” and Helen

refers here to “the Paphos-temple floor.” This unification of Thetis and Aphrodite, then, is how

Helen effects the “reconciliation of Trojan and Greek” that has troubled her throughout H.D.’s

epic. Paris has been made interchangeable with Eros, the son of Aphrodite. And now, Achilles’

mother, Thetis, has been made interchangeable with Aphrodite. Through the reconciliation of

their mothers, Paris and Achilles are reconciled.

Flack notes that H.D. used Robert Graves’s The White Goddess while working on Helen in Egypt, so she would have come across the appellation “Paphian” there as well. In the example

given below, Daeira is the Thetis figure.

Eleusis means 'Advent' and the word was adopted in the Christian mysteries to signify the

arrival of the Divine Child; in English usage it comprises Christmas and the four

preceding weeks. The mother of Eleusis was 'Daeira, daughter of Oceanus', 'the Wise

One of the Sea', and was identified with Aphrodite the Minoan Dove-goddess who rose

from the sea at Paphos in Cyprus every year with her virginity renewed. (Graves 152)

This analogy helps us make sense of Helen in Egypt’s close. If it’s an Eleusinian mystery, it’s a

story of the changing seasons, the death and rebirth of the year. It is Graves’s thesis in The White

Goddess that all myth boils down to that story. Persephone, Hades, and Demeter offer one

version; it is agreed that Persephone will spend half the year with Hades and half the year with

Demeter, thereby generating an etiology of the seasons. Helen in Egypt, it seems, is meant to

supplement or complement texts in the tradition, as spring and summer do winter and fall. This is

145

a rhetorical strategy that legitimizes her actually radical revision by making it appear a natural

and even necessary part of the tradition. H.D. capitalizes on the parallel between Thetis and

Aphrodite and enriches it; her ultimate reconciliation of Paris and Achilles depends on the

interchangeability of Thetis and Aphrodite, asserted with confidence in the final poem of

“Eidolon.”

Paris before Egypt, Paris after,

is Eros, even as Thetis,

the sea-mother, is Paphos;

so the dart of Love

is the dart of Death,

and the secret is no secret. (303)

Aphrodite is the mother of Eros, who is Paris; Aphrodite is also Thetis, mother of Achilles;

therefore, Achilles and Paris are reconciled. But only conditionally, as if seasonally: only in

Egypt. That seems to be the logic, and it only works within the myth-of-the-dying-year framework. Paris is only Eros “before Egypt, after”; but we are in Egypt, so Paris is Paris and eidolon-Helen is free to disdain him for Achilles. Outside of Egypt, the story is Homer’s, early

Euripides’, Virgil’s, early H.D’s; in Egypt, it is Sappho’s, experimental later Euripides’, late

H.D.’s.

We cannot say for certain whether H.D. is consciously echoing Sappho by employing a

Helen priamel in her own bringing-together of epic and lyric or whether she intentionally evokes a parallel scene in Virgil in which the hero’s goddess mother intervenes to protect Helen. Instead

I am trying to prove that Helen in Egypt makes the tradition “sing anew” and to show the

146

influence of the Greek Anthology in H.D.’s later ideas about lyric poetry—and poetry more broadly.

147

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