The Unweaving of Time in H.D.’s Trilogy

essay, 2021

In Trilogy, H.D. unweaves the text’s sense of time through poetic form, language, and structure, as she attempts to digest and adapt to life during and after global tragedy. In this essay, I argue that this move is one of a poet intentionally trying to create a path forward after a monumentally life-altering crisis, whose perception of time has been permanently shifted. It’s because of her experiences in both World War I and II that she sets time swirling in this three-part poem, because of the mind-shattering realities she (and the rest of the world) had to adapt to, and because in the midst of it all, words are the only possibility for eternity in the world. In an essay arguing for Trilogy to be read firmly as a war poem, Sarah H.S. Graham speaks to the tightly structured nature of the text, saying that, “At the end of reading, though, the impression is that, without imposing an inflexible structure onto that rush of language and ideas, the poem would run completely out of control, overwhelming both poet and audience,” (Graham 63). The rush that she names, in my mind, goes hand in hand with H.D.’s times alterations. It’s the rush of linear time falling away, and something new flooding in.

Graham also sees this structuring as a grasp for order and control in the midst of the wreckage of war, “To read Trilogy, to get past the illusion of control and into the details of H.D.’s battle to marry her moment to her art, is to understand how very profoundly Trilogy is a product of the war,” (Graham 164). Trauma and its relationship to time are the main aspects I want to examine from Graham’s essay. Her aim is to demonstrate the impossibility of separating Trilogy from its war context, and the paradox that H.D. faces, a paradox she explains as “uniquely war-based: H.D. is simultaneously provoked and disabled by the war because it is an experience that is both utterly new (the unprecedented destruction of the Blitz) and yet horribly reminiscent of the earlier conflict,” (Graham 173). H.D. can look to the past for some support in dealing with this new war, yet nothing can come close to the scale of World War II. A horrifying reality considering the fact that she would have had the same experience in World War I. The first World War, with civilian deaths estimated to be around 13 million and around 8.5 million soldiers killed, often initially referred to as “The Great War” due to its unprecedented scope of destruction, was itself a tragedy unlike anything ever seen before (Royde-Smith and Showalter). To go through that, and then in the same lifetime experience a war that absolutely dwarfed the first entirely, would mean adjusting to something you couldn’t have possibly conceived of before it was happening, and then adjusting to something that made the first thing you adjusted to seem tame in comparison. World War Two defies attempts to even try and estimate the human cost. According to the website for the Encyclopedia Britannica, “Statistical accounting broke down in both Allied and Axis nations when whole armies were surrendered or dispersed. Guerrilla warfare, changes in international boundaries, and mass shifts in population vastly complicated postwar efforts to arrive at accurate figures even for the total dead from all causes,” (Royde-Smith and Hughes). With that in mind, the existing estimates record that 35 to 60 million lives were lost over the course of the war.

A significant factor in H.D.’s experiences are touched on with this quote about World War II, “The money cost to governments involved has been estimated at more than $1,000,000,000,000 but this figure cannot represent the human misery, deprivation, and suffering, the dislocation of peoples and of economic life, or the sheer physical destruction of property that the war involved,” (Royde-Smith and Hughes). Numbers and estimates describing loss that are too large for a human mind to accurately comprehend become part of the environment that H.D. is occupying in the historical context of Trilogy. We can cite these facts as “real,” but what do they actually mean for us as humans? H.D.’s artistic reaction to these extreme events is crafted to be likewise in its response, “we were caught up by the tornado/ and deposited on no pleasant ground, but we found the angle of incidence/ equals the angle of reflection,” (H.D. 45). The angle of the blow that’s been struck requires an equally angled reaction. Graham remarks on this as well, “Thus, for H.D., the poet has a new role–provoked by the war–that is grounded in an unmasked response to the past, albeit perhaps with a new understanding of what the past might mean,” (Graham 174). Though not everyone agrees that Trilogy is specific to a war context, Daniel Thomières instead says, “The collection has the London Blitz as its starting point, but there are very few allusions to the war in it, as if the scope of the poem was much more general and much more comprehensive,” (Thomières 276). Rather than seeing it as an either/or discussion, I argue that crafting of it could not have been done in a different context, though we may now find it more generally applicable to humanity post-WWII.

This all plays in to the structure of Trilogy and the world H.D. crafts for us to explore. To start to break down exactly how I see H.D. constructing an unwoven sense of time in it, the sheer language itself is a good way in. She places two opposites next to each other over and over the course of the text, disorienting the reader and loosening our grip on understanding exactly which way she’s pointing us to look to. The narrators tells us a story, then adds, “some say it never happened, / some say it happens over and over,” (H.D. 139). Or other times uses “onward” to describe reaching back into the past:

I have gone forward,
I have gone backward,
I have gone onward from bronze and iron
Into the Golden Age. (H.D. 124)

The narrator moves across time in this way, playing by different rules than we might expect. There is at times this sense of both “forwards” and “backwards” intact, but at others they are combined, or rotated to merge in our view, “it merges the distant future / with most distant antiquity,” (H.D. 29). Before even needing to begin to dive into the other ways she constructs a distorted view of time, H.D. gives the reader these giant signposts to convey the fact that time is different here in Trilogy. Time has to be different to accurately tell this story of humanity. A humanity that unfailingly repeats it’s mistakes and turns frantically to find similarities in our past:

This search for historical parallels
research into psychic affinities,
has been done to death before,
will be done again. (H.D. 51)

The weighty, doomed certainty of “will be done again,” shouldn’t be overlooked. Finding parallels in history is a double-edged sword, there is comfort in the fact that humanity has made it through before, and yet there’s also the unavoidable fact of a repeated mistake. The plural “parallels” even plainly tells us that there is something cyclical happening here, some fated rotating of the world to pay attention to. The narrator repeats and cycles words in a similar way, “the same–different–the same attributes, / different yet the same as before,” (H.D. 105). The same words reshuffled, but still the same meaning remains.

Over the course of the text there are repeated lines and phrases that may give the reader a nagging sense of having seen the sentence in question somewhere before, “where, Uriel, we pause to give / thanks that we rise again from death and live,” (H.D. 70). Looking even more deeply at this example, there’s the image of the narrator being resurrected, “where Anneal, we pause to give / thanks that we rise again from death and live,” (H.D. 87). Whether it’s referring to the same instance over the course of all of these phrases, a chant repeated three times as they rise once, or a new one each time, rising from death multiple times, we are left to determine ourselves. An unmistakable sense of the cycling of time is beginning to form, though it will soon spin off its track, “where, Zadkiel, we pause to give / thanks that we rise again from death and live,” (H.D. 110). H.D. embeds meaning into the structural repetition, slowly building in power, and late in the text the narrator gives us the key to the puzzle:

And he heard, as it were, the echo
of an echo in a shell,
words neither sung nor chanted
but stressed rhythmically,
the echoed syllables of this spell. (H.D. 156)

Poetry itself is the named phantom of this text, the thing that H.D. speaks into to then echo itself across the entirety of Trilogy. An echo of an echo, a continuation of the first sound long after it finishes and long after we can discern the original source. Graham also addresses this, seeing the repeated echoes across the text as encouragement to read the text in a non-linear way, “this technique permits any given image or concept to resonate across large stretches of poetry, and the practice of ‘reading back’–in which earlier passages are enriched or clarified by later ones–is tacitly encouraged,” (Graham 164). Not even the text itself is linear in this way, it’s yet another strand unweaving. Though Graham sees this as merely a reluctance on H.D.’s part to “compartmentalize her responses into groups of lines or ideas,” I instead view it as a highly intentional strategy that accomplishes her aims in a masterful way (Graham 164). Because of this strategy, the attentive reader will move back and forth throughout the text in a way that mimics the narrators ebb and flow across time.

The act of re-reading also means that readers will build meaning up in layers, drawing connections across the pages and back again, one on top of the other in way that reflects a core concept to this text: the palimpsest. Something that has been written on, then rewritten on over and over, containing literal, physical layers of meaning on one surface. Thomières asserts that, “a first contact with Trilogy should always take into account the fact that the poem is a palimpsest, or more to the point, that all texts are palimpsests and that words are fundamentally palimpsestic,” (Thomières 279). Thomières’ essay focuses on the multiplicity to be found in Trilogy, in meaning and in self-construction, and points us to examining written language as naturally holding an inscription of time within it. As words evolve in meaning, they carry along past meaning with them, even if they are overlooked or forgotten. He also directs attention to the sonic nature of words, even as they are contained in the textual environment, as an extension of these ideas. Words exist in multiple natures and make meaning in more than one way, and H.D. uses their inherent multiplicity over the course of the entire text. Thomières brings up an instance on page (H.D. 76) when “a white agate” is mentioned, but may also refer to “a gate,” if taken sonically, then explaining further that it would be “false etymology and erroneous pronunciation, but nonetheless a clear indication: it would be a mistake to remain faithful to the surface of the words,” (Thomières 281).

It’s because H.D. specifically tells us to pay attentions to symbols that we can do this work. She tells us early on that,

grape, knife, cup, wheat
are symbols in eternity,
and every concrete object
has abstract value, is timeless
in the dream parallel. (H.D. 24)

In that case, we will certainly dig deeply to uncover more meaning beneath some of Trilogy’s words and images, specifically mirrors, unweaving hair, and clocks. The image of a mirror is brought up as Kaspar experiences his moment(s) of returned memory that lets him gaze across the scope of humanity’s history. It’s mentioned three times in regards to this moment, “and Kaspar saw as in a mirror,” (H.D. 149). Though slightly different each time, “this was Kaspar / who saw as in a mirror,” (H.D. 150). As the mirrors add up, it’s not a far jump to begin to imagine mirrors reflecting in on each other, infinitely reflecting back and forth, “he saw as in a mirror, clearly, O very clearly,” (H.D. 150). Maybe this is time held up to itself, without beginning or end, but also without substance until something is brought inside of the trio to then be mirrored. Typically, when one looks in a mirror it’s your own face to be found staring back, so it may be that the choice of words here show that Kaspar goes on to find the entire history and scope of humanity by gazing directly at his own self.

Kaspar’s episode is prompted though by the uncovering of Mary’s hair, “but when he saw the light on her hair/ like moonlight on a lost river,/ Kaspar/ remembered (H.D. 148). Her unleashed hair provides the light that serves as his mirror, showing that when it is loose and uncovered is when the strands hold the most power and depth. Something that (in this story’s context) is traditionally neat and secured, brings an epiphany when it is undone, “she was deftly un-weaving / the long, carefully-braided tresses / of her extraordinary hair,” (H.D. 141). Time is being actively unwoven here, with Kaspar’s “half-second” vision taking place over the course of multiple pages, drawing on and on even as we’re being told that time has stopped passing. Even the scale of the things he witnesses are warped, “And he saw it all as if enlarged under a sun-glass; / he saw it all in minute detail,” (H.D. 155). There comes a moment when we may wonder if he will ever pull out of this vision, because we were warned “that a Siren-song was fatal / and wrecks followed the wake of such hair,” (H.D. 142). Mary is then a Siren promising the truth of unwound time and space, and therefore the possibility of knowing humanity from a different point of view. We are left imagining something incomprehensible yet also intensely human, “and though it was all on a very grand scale, / yet it was small and intimate,” (H.D. 155). Thomières comments on this vision as well, stating that, “it is probably justified to say that H.D.’s ideal conception of what space could be is encompassed in Kaspar’s split-second vision of Atlantis,” (Thomières 286).

Time and space get brought even more explicitly in to the text via the use of clocks. The hands of the clock rotate around its center endlessly, “The clock-hand, minute by minute,/ ticks round its prescribed orbit,” (H.D. 88). H.D. has no time for mere circling or rotating with only the same ground to tread and re-tread. There is a circling to be found in this text, but it requires more than a one-dimensional view, “If the movement stops, that presumably means death, which explains that the key feature of Trilogy is the spiral, and certainly not the circle which returns to its starting point in order to repeat it exactly as it was,” (Thomières 282-283). Thomières also connects this to back to our palimpsest, “Such is the movement of the palimpsest. It is not about repetition, but about difference: things endlessly keep opening up, unfolding, and becoming different from themselves,” (Thomières 282-283). Layering meanings on top of one another, circling back within the text to discover new connections, slowly building a depth that begins to approach the real-life experience, all of these ideas culminate with the image of the spiral. It’s about digging and sharpening, everything coming to a miniscule head with the weight of everything that was passed through before behind it.

yours is the more foolish circling,
yours is the senseless wheeling
round and round– yours has no reason–
I am seeking heaven;
Yours has no vision
I see what is beneath me, what is above me,
What men say is-not–I remember,
I remember, I remember–you have forgot. (H.D. 121)

What is the final aim then? H.D. herself, of course, puts it most brilliantly, “so what good are your scribblings? / this–we take them with us / beyond death,” (H.D. 17). In the face of global war and death on a scale impossible to fully comprehend, it’s clear that there is only one way in H.D.’s eyes to truly live on forever in humanity. Graham suggests “what H.D. seeks in her own poetry,” is ‘the ability to create change, not just describe or yearn for it,’” (Graham 188). It’s the structure of words and language, the palimpsest nature inherent to literature, that enables H.D. to create a space where all of human history can begin to remember what has been forgotten, to begin “seeking what we once knew,” (H.D. 117). Nothing is out of reach when standing within Trilogy, even immortality, which I see as a direct response to the tragedy of World War II. When it must have seemed like nothing would ever be the same, that humanity and history itself may never recover, Trilogy moves to compress time and meaning, to show that the history of humanity is both a blip in the universe and the entire universe itself. Graham says, “the poet provides the bridge which allows us to understand that the past is alive in the present, and thus we–the contemporary reader under threat of bombs and a failure of faith–will survive in some form into the future,” (Graham 179). The impact of words, of poetry, on real-life is an interconnected relationship that Trilogy demonstrates comprehensively, our attention is directed to the echoes of history that are as much a part of our daily lives as anything else.

There is an interesting connection to be made here at the close of this essay. Thomières remarks on the ever-evolving application of literature of the past to our current moments, “Poems make sense in contexts which the poet who wrote them understandably never anticipated, or, rather, these contexts in which we find ourselves today suddenly begin making sense for us thanks to the potentialities of the words on the page of a text we happen to be reading,” (Thomières 277). At the time of writing this, the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center tallies the count for global cases of COVID-19 at over 120 million cases, with over 2.6 million recorded deaths. While not the most deadly disease outbreak the world has ever seen, there are many similarities to be found between H.D.’s experiences that resulted in Trilogy, and the experience today of living through a truly global pandemic. The stress and trauma that comes from unprecedented levels of media coverage, nation-wide lockdowns, and nearly a year now of separation from our communities, has resulted in, for many, a dramatic sense of altered-time. I can say with much certainty that I have been more attuned to the work H.D. does with time in Trilogy because of the period that I’m living through, because of the dueling sensation in my mind of time being both stopped and passing twice as fast as it used to. I take comfort in H.D.’s world that imagines events as “unavoidable / and already written in a star / or a configuration of stars,” and in this way eternally connected to every other moment in human history (H.D. 144). A moment can be both unprecedented and old as time itself, and across time and space humanity always manages to reach across it all and endure.

Works Cited

“COVID-19 Map.” Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html. Graham, Sarah H. S. “‘We Have a Secret. We Are Alive’: H.D.'s Trilogy as a Response to War.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 44, no. 2, 2002, p161–210. 
H.D. Trilogy. New Directions, 1998.
Royde-Smith, John Graham and Hughes, Thomas A.. "World War II". Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-II. Accessed 14 March 2021.
Royde-Smith, John Graham and Showalter, Dennis E.. "World War I". Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Mar. 2021, https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I. Accessed 14 March 2021.
Thomières, Daniel. “H.D.’s Trilogy: The Multiplicity of Being.” Enthymema (Milano), Vol. 12, no. 12, 2015, p276–302.