H. D. and Eurydice

Abstract

. . . everything is at stake in the decision of the gaze. - Blanchot, Gaze of (104) In their uses of Orpheus, poets have dwelt on the figure of Orpheus while remains an enigma, the shadowy instance that allows the transformation of a poet into Orpheus. It is the paradox of Orpheus's myth that it is in his moment of forgetting what he has labored so intensely to achieve that he accedes to the highest level of poetic creation. A alive in truth, in Blanchot's phrase (from the essay Gaze of [100]), is a figure of farce, like the much-tried wife of Cocteau's film who must constantly duck under the furniture to avoid husband's gaze in an ultimately futile effort to avoid second death. is twice forgotten: forgotten first because she is remembered only as the occasion of Orpheus's first miracle, his descent to the underworld, and forgotten again when second death endows Orpheus's voice with such overwhelming power that loss seems nugatory. Most accounts of the legend assume (even if they do articulate) Ovid's blithe disregard of Eurydice's plight: What did she have to complain of? One thing, only: He loved her (Book X, lines 61-62, p. 36). But the story of Orpheus's gaze is only the story of the mute female object passive before the male artist's gaze. It is also the story of the artist's dependence on that erotic other, the external subject that enables him to become the artist who is Orpheus. It is this redoubled doubleness that Blanchot expresses - the emptiness of doubled by the emptiness of Orpheus, whose inspiration is possible only in a moment of complete self-forgetting: If inspiration means that Orpheus fails and is lost twice over . . . it also turns Orpheus towards that failure and that insignificance and coerces him, by an irresistible impulse, as though giving up failure were much more serious than giving up success. (102) The category of diurnal truth seems equally alien to both elements of this story, although traditionally only is thought to have died. In the context of H.D.'s larger work, poem Eurydice exists in a limbo that parallels that of its subject. It was included in Amy Lowell's collection Some Imagist Poets and organized into the section entitled God by when Collected Poems was published in 1925. Critics have typically folded it into the stream of later poems such as Helen in Egypt and Calypso, where, in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's words, H.D. has attempted to give a voice to one of the female figures long left voiceless within our culture (420).(1) In this reading, stands as a figure who, like the later personae adopted by H.D., successfully articulates a vibrant female reality that contests the dominant masculine worldview. For DuPlessis, Eurydice claims the colorless and contingent hell of the poem as the sufficient space of poetic creation, not the space of rejection, negation, and loss, but [of] the splendor of essential life (411).(2) For critics interested in imagist poetics, Eurydice lies outside the core of H.D.'s practice, as represented by first collection Sea Garden and the two most anthologized poems from the second collection, Oread and Pool, all dominated by imagist practices.(3) Unlike such poems whose opening lines evoke a crystalline moment of vision - Weed, mossweed, / root tangled in or hard sand breaks (from Iris and Hermes of the Ways) - Eurydice is imagist but narrative, and it begins with sight but with speech that expresses pure rage: So you have swept me back, / I who could have walked with the live souls / above the earth (CP, 1983, 51). Only after this blast of anger will offer images, as in description of hell where lichens drip / dead cinders upon moss of ash.(4) But to read H. …