Letter 8. Viole(n)t.
Lately I’ve spent a lot of time wondering if there’s anything about the years I spent producing academic writing about English poetry that can be salvaged from the wreck of the university. I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that I was never actually that good at the kind of criticism I was encouraged to be doing, that my methods were always a little perverse and obscure. The only really worked-out poem-reading method I have practiced is that advanced by Veronica Forrest-Thomson in her posthumously published critical book Poetic Artifice. Forrest-Thomson writes that ‘good’ reading of poems
dwells on the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as phonetic and prosodic patterns and spatial organisation, and tries to state their relation to other levels of organisation rather than set them aside in an attempt to produce a statement about the world.
When I first read these words at the age of 19, they lit up something in poetry for me. I began reading poems in the manner she describes, trying to see their formal structures rather than decide what they meant. With practice, I became able to trigger these different levels of the poem in an almost synaesthetic way – they would rise out of the page, not literally but in a response to attention, as if colour-coded. Looked at in this way, a poem can be viewed like a layered diagram or map. This is what the poem became for me in my studies of Forrest-Thomson. A poem is like a small model of a complex system built out of language. The poem, viewed with such an understanding, became the sole object of my study and passions for many years.
When I taught poetry, I always began with H.D.’s ‘Sea Violet’. I don’t teach these sorts of courses any more and don’t expect I ever will, but I’ve spent such an inordinate amount of time with this poem over the years that I’ve decided to write up my findings, and then finally move on. As it’s out of copyright, having been written over a hundred years ago, I can reproduce it here for you now in its entirety.
The white violet
is scented on its stalk,
the sea-violet
fragile as agate,
lies fronting all the wind
among the torn shells
on the sand-bank.
The greater blue violets
flutter on the hill,
but who would change for these
who would change for these
one root of the white sort?
Violet
your grasp is frail
on the edge of the sand-hill,
but you catch the light—
frost, a star edges with its fire.
Teaching this poem, I’d have started the conversation by talking about convention; we might think that there’s nothing so rule-bound as a sonnet or haiku here, but we recognise this as a poem at first sight – a slim column of lines a few words long, each phrase isolated and emphasised. That this is what A Poem looks like in fact probably comes from the influence of ‘Imagism’, a movement that Ezra Pound founded based on H.D.’s work, and related movements. The stereotype of the poem as sparse and aesthetic, rather than rhythmic and rhyming, is one whose dominance in uk/anglo reading culture is now nearly complete – the most popular contemporary poets, measured purely by number of eyeballs, are internet-savvy authors like Nayyirah Waheed and Rupi Kaur, for whom (or, perhaps more importantly, for whose fans and critics) this sparseness is the indicator of poemhood. It also places particular pressure on the formation of individual sentences and phrases – that is, each one has to be well-made – and reduces older poems’ reliance on intricate syntax, although we will return to H.D.’s syntax later. The reason this is Forrest-Thomson’s starting point is that she knows if we go into a poem like ‘Sea Violet’ expecting the chunky prosody and complex metaphorical conceit of (say) a Shakespeare sonnet, we will be disappointed, confused, and prone to category mistakes that will collapse anything interesting or diverting about the poem.
Next, I like to read the poem aloud, hear it. When I used to mark essays on this poem, new readers of poetry would frequently ascribe personalities to the vowel and consonant sounds, seemingly at random. A series of /s/ sounds could be harsh or soft, of /b/s bubbly or bare, based on whatever argument they were hoping to make at that time. None of them convinced me, as I don’t think that vowel or consonant sounds do have personalities particularly. (And yes, I know about the bouba/kiki effect – all this means is that sounds have shapes in our mouths, not personalities or moods.) Repeated sounds just create patterns, maybe drawing attention to a particular phrase, or linking different parts of the poem, popping up like subway stations on our city map. But this is something poems think about that (say) newspaper articles don’t – but newspaper headlines and advertising slogans frequently do. The poem is not showily alliterative, but some lines do seem to be structured by it when their most prominent words share a first consonant (scented/stalk, frost/fire). This is moderately interesting and might even, if we’re so inclined, be considered pleasing,
The syntax of ‘Sea Violet’ is deceptive; an examination of each sentence reveals that it is struggling to hold together grammatically. The first sentence needs more punctuation to be properly parsed; if line 2 ended with a semicolon and line 3 with a comma, it would read like prose, albeit somewhat fanciful prose: ‘The white violet is scented on its stalk; the sea-violet, fragile as agate, lies fronting all the wind…’ Because it doesn’t do this, we are left with a grammatically incomplete sentence which even leads some readers to think that there are three types of violet in the poem, not just two; but it does seem to me that the sea violet and the white violet are the same, and ironically it is the lack of more decisive punctuation that makes this a convincing reading. The second sentence is pretty prosy apart from one exception, the repeated line ‘who would change for these’. Its repetition isn’t what’s really off-putting about it, but its old-fashioned mis-ordering (a.k.a. hyperbaton). In an imagined everyday conversation scenario, we would say ‘who would [ex]change one white root for these [blue violets]?’ This mis-ordering is necessary because of the expansion of what I have phrased as ‘one white root’ into ‘one root of the white sort’. What meaning does this add if not just ‘one white root’? It’s not clear whether the ‘white root’ is a synecdoche, where the white root stands in for the sea violet flower, or if literally the root, the hidden but essential part of the white plant, is worth more than an entire blue plant. The direction of the imagined exchange is not entirely clear, but I infer from the ‘but’ that it is the white sea violet that is being treasured above the more expected, secure, and biologically successful blue violet.
[Image description: a violet, purple in the centre and white at the edges, against a background of green leaves.]
Although H.D. is today one of the more popular poets of her time and scene for academic study, critics are pretty useless on the subject of this poem in particular. Susan Stewart writes, on the subject of ‘Sea Violet’,
When [H.D.] repeats ‘who would change for these’, she lets the rhetorical reenter, creating an effect of awakening the reader from a dream of images into a world made of words.
I apologise for interpolating this tedious observation into our discussion, but I think it offers a nice specimen of what we’re up against. I have three main problems with it. One, ‘creating an effect of’ is a wholly useless and meaningless phrase, especially because Stewart doesn’t explain how the effect is achieved. This type of phrase is beloved of new poetry readers/critics-in-training, because it lets them take a run at an opinion, but since we are confident in our opinions let us launch them from a standing start. Two, the binary of the image-dream and the word-world makes no sense – as if there were no words in dreams, and as if language were more aligned with the physical world than images are. Three, and this is the most damning, Stewart imagines that H.D. ‘lets the rhetorical reenter’ only in this line – as if the simile ‘fragile as agate’, the catachrestic (mis-used) adjective ‘torn’ for shells, and the hyperbolic (exaggerated) ‘fronting all the wind’ were not rhetorical! Stewart supposes that ‘Sea Violet’ ‘only broadly follows’ Pound’s dictates of imagist aesthetics, but what she fails to see is that Pound’s own imagist poems, and those by all the group, are crammed with rhetorical and ideological sentiments that their authors either do not identify or are deliberately, maliciously sneaking under the wire.
The long dash that ends the second-last line works a lot like a semicolon, indicates an extended but anticipatory pause before we are ‘hit’ with the last line. This is quite a good way to avoid what some critics call the ‘dying fall’, the letdown that the end of every poem basically is. By its very nature a poem promises so much, and its sense of its own importance is inflated to such a degree, that when you discover that its moment of truth is temporary and it doesn’t really know how to fix the world, it’s a disappointment. The ending of a poem, the dismount, is the hardest part, and so one technique is to big up the end of the poem by isolating it. This is why, for instance, English sonnets end with a rhyming couplet. But that doesn’t explain why it is a long dash in particular that does that work of separation here, rather than one of the many other pauses poets have to draw upon. We could further ask: why, when we already have the line break, comma, full stop, ellipsis, mid-line break, and so on, do we need such an extensive vocabulary of pauses and ruptures? They’re all quite good excuses to pause to let something sink in and/or change tack, but each also has its own personality. The dash, it seems to me, comes out of the grammar of the scribbled note, as if we were writing (like Emily Dickinson) on the back of an envelope: I could explain this but you already know, yada yada yada. Even when the reader doesn’t already know, this is a good way of bringing us into the confidence of the poem. Of course, a sensitive type like you understands this. And even if we don’t, it’s an invitation to go along on the assumption that all will become clear. That’s why it’s good to end a poem like this on such a note, because it is fragmentary in some ways, but the long dash tells us we should have been inferring the whole time, and that the inferences we did come up with in the course of our reading are vindicated, or at least retroactively imbued with more relevance than we previously imagined.
The vocabulary of ‘Sea Violet’, in contrast to some of the other poems of Sea Garden, is fairly tame; if we’re happy to accept that there are different types of violet without wondering what they look like, the word we are most likely to need to look up is ‘agate’, and even then not if we have spent a little time browsing cheap keyrings in museum gift shops. But given the rarefied atmosphere of the poem, the sense turns on subtle connotations and suggestions in the description of the flowers, and chief among these is the ‘delicate’, ‘white’ image of the sea-violet. I’ve written before about the way that ‘nature poems’ are often a proxy for cultural anxieties, and H.D. indulges in this too, with the pressure she puts on the delicate, feminine, white nature of the flowers – if, as many critics have quite understandably suggested, H.D. identified herself or her own creative endeavours with these flowers, this came from a young white woman living only a few miles north of the Mason-Dixon line during the era of Jim Crow. What look like apolitical poems – and I suspect they attract anthologists for this reason – demand to be read against the grain as racially paranoid. An unquestioning equation with the pale and delicate flower with white womanhood, whether it was ‘intended’ by H.D. or not, inflects any criticism, any reaction to the poem(s).
[Image description: a stone marker carved with a shield and crown, one of the indicators of the Mason-Dixon line.]
This is where I depart from Forrest-Thomson and Poetic Artifice a bit. According to her, our understanding of the poem having filtered through all of these technical elements can ascend to the level of the ‘image-complex’. In all her favourite poems, and mine too, the image-complex is ‘disconnected’, that is, it refuses a false coherence of content and ‘sends [the reader] back’ to discover what the other, more formal elements hold. For Forrest-Thomson, there are parts of the poem that help it make sense and parts that do not, the ‘relevant’ and ‘irrelevant’ elements, and what they are relevant to is the thematic synthesis. After that, it is finally allowable to make a judgement on a ‘thematic synthesis’, basically what less thorough critics imagine they are able to deduce at a glance, which is what the poem is ‘about’. But I generally find that excessive concern with this relevance is the major obstacle to a satisfactory reading of poetry; I may find that a poem is ‘about’ something or not, but what it is not about is not irrelevant. ‘Sea Violet’ is not ‘about’ white womanhood shoring itself up in futurist fragments against a decade, the 1910s, in which the chickens of imperialism come home to roost in the form of industrial war in Europe.
I sometimes think that poems are bad places to go looking for themes; our surroundings are so saturated with themes in disguise, peeping out from behind every billboard and tweet, that the poem seems to be the only theatre of language left in which we are not trying to be convinced of a fact. And yet stubborn readers of poems have a lot of surreptitious ways of getting to the heart of the matter. One of them is reading and finding out about the life of the poet, which sometimes feels to me a bit like trying to find out about a city by digging up and interviewing its founding saint. There are some scholars who are awfully interested in pinning down exactly which beach H.D. was writing about; this type of scholarship used to be summed up, as Pound wrote somewhere, ‘what porridge had John Keats?’ (Note the hyperbaton there as well – anything to keep words from their expected positions, to make it stick in your mental craw, and be remembered.) There’s another school of thought that says this doesn’t matter, that what’s sustaining about Sea Garden is that it could refer to any beach, but this isn’t true either – the landscape Sea Garden describes is almost alienatingly specific, and a big reason why some people with whom I have read these poems don’t connect with them is that they can’t picture these particular flowers. The idea that some sort of knowledge is escaping us closes a door on some readers, while for others – perhaps those already glutted on useless knowledge – it adds the very frisson that has convinced them the poem is worth keeping.
I first read about H.D. in Helen Carr’s book The Verse Revolutionaries, which I read the same summer I first read Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I felt the same sort of connection with the young H.D. as I did with Forrest-Thomson; I wanted (then) someone to meet me for tea at the British Museum and decide that my poems were profoundly significant, like Pound did for H.D. But H.D.’s great enthusiast turned out to be an even more enthusiastic fascist, which makes me wonder if these deceptively simple pressed-flower poems are just a sort of femme futurism – the gentleness and tenderness of wildflowers on the beach aestheticise away any power relations that might be involved in who gets to wander it contemplatively, and why those particular wanderings are still picked over after a century.
I suppose I’m writing this letter to finally get this poem out of my system after so many years, and to correct some of the mistakes I made in reading it, alone and with others. An embarrassingly long interval elapsed before I realised that a ‘verse revolutionary’ and an actual revolutionary don’t necessarily have much in common, and indeed that their material interests are frequently at odds. But if there’s something this last reading of ‘Sea Violet’ has finally taught me, it’s that poems are implicated in violence by the very precision they use to try to hold themselves apart from it.