The walls do not fall,

by H.D.

H.D. is well known to all lovers of verse as one of the earliest ‘Imagists’. These, her latest poems, come from the very midst of the ‘fifty thousand incidents’ of the Blitz. The memorable poetry of these times is not likely to be military in the old sense. This is a civilian’s war, and this is civilian war poetry.

'Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava
pressure on the heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst in its brittle case
(What the skull can endure!)

The outer violence of the scene touches the deepest hidden sub-concious terrors. The past is on show. The house of life becomes ‘another sliced wall where poor utensils show like rare objects in a museum.’ The mystery of death invades; but above all is the eve-startling miracle of the breath of life.

(From the back cover)

Genres: Poetry

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

An innovative modernist American writer, Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961) wrote under her initials in a career that stretched from 1909 to 1961. H.D., most well known for her lyric and epic poetry, also wrote novels, memoirs, short stories, essays, reviews, a children’s book, and translations. An American woman who lived her adult life abroad, H.D. was engaged in the formalist experimentation that preoccupied much of her generation. A range of thematic concerns resonates through her writing: the role of the poet, the civilian representation of war, material and mythologized ancient cultures, the role of national and colonial identity, lesbian and queer sexuality, and religion and spirituality.

Reviews

[Muriel Unseth · Rating 5 out of 5]

O, do not look up
into the air,

you who are occupied
in the bewildering

sand-heap maze
of present-day endeavor;

you will be, not so much frightened
as paralysed with inaction,

and anyhow,
we have not crawled so very far

up our individual grass-blade
toward our individual star.

Poetry isn't always my thing, or maybe certain types of poetry really aren't my thing. Whatever the case... this was my thing. Among other motions, H.D. constructs a holy trinity between time, truth, and symbol- or, rephrased: ideation, ideal, and idea. I'm a stone-cold sucker for most things from roughly 1910-1950 at the moment, and this investigation of the destruction of WWII, of the modernist relationship to antiquity, of the necessity of literature as our connection to the past that outlives the practical and more permanent-seeming constructions of real life, both literal and metaphorical... it read like a revelation. Maybe I'm just in the zone. Maybe it's just that good. Maybe both. I have much more to say about this that's better spilled in real life.

I was talking with a professor yesterday about the sequence of literary development from classical to modernist to postmodernist, seeing it in metaphorical terms of a "body" of literature (I know, I know) where classics involves the whole body (emphasis on the musculature), modernism rejects the flesh and keeps the bone structure (broken, intending to rebuild), and postmodernism just boils it all into soup that tastes like angst (regeneration is HARD)... and he told me I absolutely had to read The Walls Do Not Fall, and it turns out H.D.'s project here is just a gorgeous take on the question "what are we to do with all these bones?"

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An incredible defense of the importance of poetry (and art in general) in times of death and fear. H.D.'s words were timely and poignant in World War II and remain just as necessary now. I found a first edition copy of this in a bookshop, and it is now one of my greatest treasures. :')

"Grant us strength to endure
a little longer,

now the heart's alabaster
is broken;

we would feed forever
on the amber honey-comb

of your remembered greeting,
but the old-self,

still half at-home in the world,
cries out in anger,

I am hungry, the children cry for food
and flaming stones fall on them;

our awareness leaves us defenceless;
O, for your Presence

among the fishing-nets
by the beached boats on the lake-edge;

when, in the drift of wood-smoke,
will you say again, as you said,

the baked fish is ready,
here is the bread?" (35).