HD'S TRILOGY: MODERN GNOSTICISM?

Abstract

The article outlines the thematic development of HD's sequence of poems Trilogy. It uses the term 'Gnosticism' to point up its religious character in terms of personal knowledge, 'feminine' values, Hellenistic syncretism and dualistic oppositionality predicated on a resurrectional dynamic. It also suggests its therapeutic quality in using a poetic of religious discourse to create a healing affect, as it progresses from the evocation of the Blitz to a vision of renewal. The paper seeks to draw attention to the merits of a little-known poem and examine it to suggest the generally 'gnostic' condi tion of postmodem religious thought. This article was originally presented as a paper at the Glasgow 'Dissent and Marginality' conference of September 1994, and the questioned term 'Gnosticism' sought to address the conference theme. On the one hand the poem Trilogy/ despite the growing amount of HD scholarship,2 might be said to have been marginalised in comparison with a comparable sequence such as T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets; on the other its material is theologically heterodox and certainly fits the larger idea of the gnostic as that against which orthodox Christian belief became formulated. However, the very focus of the conference signified a general postmodem relativisation of the idea of consent and centrality in both literature and theology, and the poem may be seen as a prophetic instance of the growing interest in intellectual syncreticism and inter-faith dialogue. Although certain characteristics will be suggested to qualify the term 'Gnosticism', it is used mainly to establish a critical placement for Trilogy within the modem poetry of religion. There has been no attempt to relate the poem to, for instance, the Nag Hammadi and other non canonical Christian texts, the counter-theology of Marcion or Valentinus, the many scholarly texts written about the gnostics or even HD's own specifically Moravian background. For the poem helps test quite what might be termed 'orthodox' and 'heterodox' in the 1990s, and its resurrectional insistence might well place it within a wider understanding of Christian identity, as defined, for instance, by Hans Kung: © Oxford University Press 1996 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 23 Nov 2016 04:28:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms