Wednesday poem: from Sagesse, by HD
HD's mysterious poem about an owl
from Sagesse
May those who file before you feel
Something of what you are — that God is kept within
the narrow confines of a cage, a pen;
they will laugh and linger and some child may shudder,
touched by the majesty, the lifted wings,
the white mask and the eyes that seem to see
like God, everything and like God, see nothing;
our small impertinence, our little worth
is invisible in the day; when darkness comes,
you will be no more a fool, a clown,
a white-faced Scops, a captive and in prison,
but noble and priest and soldier, scribe and king,
will hail you, sacrosanct, white frail women
bend and sway between the temple pillars,
till the torches flicker and fail,
and there is only faint light from the braziers
and the ghostly trail of incense, and cries of recognition
and of gladness in the fragrant air.
The poet
HD was born in Pennsylvania in 1886 and died in 1961 in Switzerland. Although her birth name was Hilda Doolittle, she wrote under the name HD, so I’ll refer to her that way. Her life and work took her across the Atlantic to unusual places. She was bisexual and had a relationship with the poet Ezra Pound, before marrying the Imagist poet Robert Aldington. However, in 1918 she met the novelist Bryher, who became her lover and long-term partner until her death. This poem is a late work from HD’s book Hermetic Definition (1958).
Along with Pound and Aldington, HD helped develop the Imagist movement in 1912.
Sometimes groups of poets are called a ‘movement’ in hindsight, even if the poets are loosely linked and have different goals. In this case, the three knew that they were doing something new with poetry, and decided on three core principles:
Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose poetry in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
To break that down a little: deal directly with the main idea in the poem, whether it’s about an object or something more abstract, like music or a conversation. No unnecessary language, no frills. Compose poetry like music.
Reflection
Let’s look at two of the Imagist principles that HD is honouring.
Direct treatment of the 'thing'
Sagesse is a sequence of poems inspired by a picture of a Scops owl in a London zoo. HD speaks to the real owl directly: “those who file before you” see only “something of what you are.” She wants to capture how surprising it is to see a bird spread its wings, using simple imagery: “the lifted wings, / the white mask”. Then HD lifts the poem to another level: the owl seems to see “like God, everything and like God, see nothing”. The speaker imagines that when night comes, the owl could be “like God” in an ancient temple, hailed by all classes — “noble and priest and soldier, scribe and king” and worshipped by temple maidens. When night falls, the owl will be honoured for its beauty and mystery, qualities that modern people are unable to appreciate.
No needless words
HD deliberately keeps the poem minimalistic, with two-line stanzas and a structure that shifts from the zoo to the temple. The visual imagery recedes until “there is only faint light” and the smell of incense, as if we’re standing in a temple, seeing mysterious shapes in the darkness, hearing “cries of recognition / and of gladness” from the worshippers, or perhaps from birds in the zoo. The speaker sounds very confident that the owl will be worshipped, but this could be all in their imagination.
To see how stripped back this approach is, let’s compare to two other owl poems. The first is Elizabeth Sears Gerberding’s poem What Sees the Owl? In this 1889 poem, Gerberding packs the lines with imagery: “magic,” “velvet wing,” “aurora,” cobwebs, dewdrops, fireflies, sunlight, frost, frost spirits. It’s a lovely poem, and, in the style of much late nineteenth century poetry, a bit bewildering, crammed with imagery: the forest is flashing in front of our eyes. This is a maximalist approach, piling picture on sound on picture.
Secondly, let’s go back much earlier and look at Thomas Vautor’s 1619 poem, Sweet Suffolk Owl.
Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight
With feathers, like a lady bright;
Thou sing'st alone, sitting by night,
"Te whit! Te whoo!"
Thy note that forth so freely rolls
With shrill command the mouse controls;
And sings a dirge for dying souls.
"Te whit! Te whoo!"
Vautor’s poem cuts straight through to what he wants to say about the owl, using just one metaphor in the first stanza: the owl is neat, trim and looks like a brightly dressed lady singing to the night. There’s a similar idea — the owl is powerful in the night-time. But here, it’s noticeable that using just one standout, “bright” image gives a clarity to the poem: it’s hard to imagine the poem having many more verses about the owl, because it’s all been said. In this case, there is no need for extra words.
This can be a matter of taste, because some readers are going to prefer Gerberding’s chase through the forest. But there’s a fabulous craft in creating a poem as short and vivid as Vautor’s, which builds up a world of night and death in just a few words. The poets behind Imagism believed that much late nineteenth century poetry was dealing with “vague generalities” when poetry needed to be precise. Imagist poetry tried to go back to what poetry was really about by stripping a poem down to its essentials, cutting through to a key image which informed all the others.
HD’s poem has more imagery than Vautor’s, but many less images than Gerberding’s. Stripped down, these make a compelling journey: God in cage / lifted wings, white mask / eyes / darkness / fool / captive / worshippers / torches / incense. There’s a throughline idea: the owl represents godliness and mystery, unappreciated in the modern world, better understood by ancient people who were closer to nature.
In HD’s poem it’s easy to imagine a camera trained on the real owl, the scenery shifting around it to a strange temple, panning round the temple to show the worshippers. In Gerberding’s poem, we see one image after another. By keeping it simple, HD goes to wild places.
Writing about the real thing
When I was at primary school, we had to sing a song about animals in the countryside — “the wild geese fly, a group in the sky.” We were told, “This song isn’t really about geese or sheep. It’s about people getting along and living in harmony.” I thought it sounded patronising. The song was obviously about animals, even if it had the message of getting along. The explanation made it sound as if the writer was playing a trick. Why did the song have to not really be about something to have a message? Why did it have to stop being about animals, in order to have a message about humans?
Frankly, years later, I think my eleven-year old self was onto something. Take this truism: “Moby-Dick isn’t really about a whale.” The underlying idea is that the subject of the novel (a whale) is on the surface, but it’s smarter to see ‘through’ the story to the themes (main ideas, like the struggle of man vs nature).
As a tutor teaching the UK English Literature and Language curriculum, I came across this way of thinking many times: the notion that it’s smart to theorise about what a story/poem/play is ‘really about’ over its subject matter. That works — right up until you read Moby-Dick, and realise it absolutely is about whales. From my favourite chapter, ‘The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View’:
“… the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it.”
There are pages of concrete description, along with wonderful imaginings about the parts of whales concealed by the ocean, unseen by hunters. In amongst all his complex thought about hunting, masculinity, loneliness and the environment, Herman Melville was obsessively interested in real whales. He wanted to show the world in a whale. None of the complexity of his thought is cancelled out; it’s enriched by his focus on detail, his desire to link the smallness of a whale’s eye to the amazingness of nature without cancelling out the about. Not every tiny piece of subject needs to be forced to serve a theme, when the subject in itself is fascinating. “Why then do you try to “enlarge” your mind? Subtilize it.” Literal, meet metaphorical — it’s whales all the way down.
Imagist thought came later than Melville, but the Imagists were also interested in using a concrete image to explore a notion, or a group of ideas. Even if a poet picked an image full of symbolic meaning, like an owl, they must describe the image so that it could be visualised. The subject matter of the poem would be as important as the themes.
A little more symbolism
In his introduction to Hermetic Definition, Norman Holmes Pearson explains that HD was suffering from a broken hip while writing the poem in hospital in Switzerland. A foreigner in a strange country, she was “watched over by a German doctor on the staff much interested and a little puzzled by her poems.” In Pearson’s interpretation, the poem was about HD, “herself caged”. Elsewhere in the sequence, HD takes up the voice of a child seeing the owl: “There was the balancing imagined little girl looking at the owl.”1
But HD was also influenced by Egyptian and Hellenistic mythology. The Egyptians associated owls with death, while further north, owls were associated with the multifarious knowledge and wisdom of the Greek goddess Athena, then the Roman goddess Minerva. Minerva’s remit was wide: she was the goddess of wisdom, medicine, poetry, music, commerce, craft and weaving. Minerva’s owl became a symbol of wisdom.
One interpretation could be that the owl in HD’s poem symbolises an ancient wisdom overlooked today, but what kind of wisdom? Some might link the owl/Minerva to the woolly concept of ‘feminine wisdom’ — the idea that all women somehow have access to a special authentic version of wisdom, which is overlooked by modern society. But this is vague. It’s projecting a modern idea on the ancient symbolism of a goddess who represented a specific cultural idea of wisdom. It also doesn’t seem as if HD is making this point, since the owl is never described in a markedly feminine way; it’s described as “like God.”
One key is the sacred symbolism that animals used to have: in Ancient Greece, an owl on a branch was full of meaning to people who saw it. In John Berger’s book Why Look at Animals?, he addressed the question of why animals become symbolic for humans: “The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood.”2 Berger argues that the symbolism of animals came from the closeness that ancient humans and animals used to enjoy. “Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.” (p7) But:
“In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.” (p9)
HD’s poem speaks to the gap between humans and animal: where humans used to worship animals, now they struggle to really see them. An animal used to be as important as the ideas it symbolised, but where there used to be “cries of recognition” now the crowd is trying to understand what they see.
Holmes Pearson, Norman. Introduction. Hermetic Definition, HD, New Directions, New York City, 1972, p11.
Berger, John, Why Look at Animals? Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, p5.