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With What Materials Must We Build Our Walls? Spiritual Scholarship and Trauma Recovery in H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

H.D. 's 43-poem sequence, “The Walls Do Not Fall,” examines the horrors and aftermath of the Blitz in London through various religious and occult references. Armed with the language of turn-of-the-century syncretism, H.D. traces the spirals of life, death, and rebirth that she and her generation struggled to understand in the wake of the World Wars. With compassion for a generation of people frozen in time by trauma and clueless as to how to move on, she investigates spirituality and the history of religion for the answers. In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” H.D. details how the search for meaningful and fulfilling spirituality can heal individuals and groups in the wake of unprecedented trauma.

H.D. wrote “The Walls Do Not Fall” in the aftermath of World War II, and sets her poems against a London damaged during the Blitz, as suggested by the epigraph at the beginning: “from London 1942” (Doolittle 1). The poem’s speaker describes a war-marked London in the first few lines: “An incident here and there, / and rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square” (3). The speaker indicates not only the damage done to London over the course of many “incidents,” but what the city sacrificed for the war effort. WWII completely stripped London of its normalcy and certainty. The people of the city shared an unspeakable trauma after experiencing what the speaker describes as “shock knit within terror” (4). In the aftermath, the speaker says “we wonder / what saved us? What for?” (4). The speaker feels the physical, skeletal ache of trauma, but also notices the existential fallout. The body holds onto the fear after surviving an impossible violence, while the spirit agonizes over the fog of the present and future. Moving forward, the poem’s speaker explores the spiritual implications of trauma and the possibility for healing, wondering what could possibly come next.

The early poems in the sequences capture a loss of faith and a struggle to believe in either divinity or humanity amidst the ruin of WWII. The speaker formulates a quasi-apocalyptic Europe, where “Evil was active in the land / Good was impoverished and sad [...] Dev-ill was after us / tricked up like Jehovah” (5). WII left behind a land in which faith– in religion, in human nature, even in science– failed the people. After two huge wars’ worth of atrocities, who can see humankind as inherently good, or believe in a benevolent God? A person grappling with this reality will likely find more evidence for the non-existence of divinity, or even that the Devil successfully took his reign over the earth. In direct contradiction to the conventions of the hero’s journey, “The Walls Do Not Fall” begins not with birth, but with death. H.D. begins her spiritual journey in the underworld stage, a time of hopelessness and loss, and a place many can never find their escape from.

In H.D. 's formulations of spiritual renewal, the convergence of past and future plays a key role. The speaker calls for “a new fire” and “new paeans to the new sun,” but immediately clarifies that “we have always worshipped Him, / we have always said, / forever and ever, Amen” (26). On first glance, this combination appears self-contradictory. The speaker claims a need for a new religion with new rituals, yet also believes this new religion is ancient and eternal. The speaker first captures a yearning to make the ancient new again, to re-discover humanity’s spiritual connections deep in the species’ roots. Furthermore, they imply an ongoing, perpetual cycle of regeneration in which humankind finds and loses their spirituality again and again. This is what the speaker means by a divinity that “merges the distant future / with most distant antiquity” (29). The speaker’s spirituality exists in an alternative temporality in which time is not a straight line, but a tangled coil.

Moving through the strands of this coil means meeting up again with ancient faiths and deities, partially forgotten and obscured by the passage of time. The poem’s speaker proclaims:

so let us search the old highways
for the true-rune, the right-spell,
recover old values;
nor listen if they shout out,
your beauty, Isis, Aset or Astarte,
is a harlot (5).

The speaker views universal truths not as a distant goal striven toward into the future, but as something humans have always had a relationship with from the earliest eras of our existence and have temporarily lost touch with. According to this view, truth is a matter of archaeology, of digging through the sediments into the past. The speaker references Isis/Aset and Astarte, goddesses from Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies, respectively. Both of these goddesses contain a life and death duality, with Isis once worshiped as a mother goddess as well as the guide to the afterlife, and Astarte once called upon in matters of healing as well as war and hunting (Lesko; Schmitt). These goddesses are originators and enders; they are both ends of the coil. No matter how far one wanders from them, they shall always return to them in the end. The speaker refers to modern Christian society’s rejection of the goddesses, noting how detractors might describe them as “a harlot” and “retrogressive” (Doolittle 5). The speaker resists the cultural push to reject the old religions and write them off as barbaric and heathen. They see the unrest of the early 20th century as an opportunity to not only resurrect lost faiths, but to synthesize them into something new and regenerative.

The poem’s speaker embodies the multitudinous nature of the life/death goddesses in the way they represent destruction as an intimate partner of creation. The speaker suggests that the path to meaningful transformation (for the individual or the collective) must wind through darkness, pain, fear, and uncertainty. In one stanza, the speaker says “I in my own way know / that the whale / can not digest me” (9). Later, they say “I profit / by every calamity: / I eat my way out of it” (12). These portions of the poem describe both the speaker and the reader emerging whole out of the darkness in a form of rebirth. The individual, when recovering from trauma, spends time in a darkness through which nobody can reach them, and must find a way out on their own. The reference to the whale brings forth the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, an archetypal story representing the cycle of spiritual death and rebirth– a whale swallows Jonah upon his rejection of God, and spits him up only after he accepts God and asks for His forgiveness (NIV Bible, Matthew 12). In this poem, however, no God blesses the speaker with freedom; instead, they create it for themself by becoming “hard” and “indigestible” (Doolittle 9). In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” salvation comes from inner strength and fortitude, not from a greater power. The spiritual and esoteric do not solve life’s problems, but offer paths and tools for coping, strengthening the self, and finding meaning in the darkness.

The spiritual philosophy of this poem advocates for the embrace of the cyclical nature of all things. Acceptance of the cycle opens up opportunities for healing by contextualizing tragedy and trauma as temporary moments to pass through rather than the whole of one’s new reality. The speaker uses the symbolic language of astrology to describe the cycle of things. When they say “Amen, Aries, the Ram / time, time for you to begin a new spiral,” they look upon the stage of beginnings and birth, as Aries is the first sign in the astrological cycle (the zodiac) (30). Later, they walk through the final stages of the zodiac:

I heard Scorpion whet his knife,
I feared Archer (taut his bow),
Goat’s horns were threat,
would climb high? then fall low;
across the abyss
the Waterman waited. (40)

The figures in these lines refer to Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, and Aquarius, respectively -- the latter portion of the zodiac before the final sign, Pisces. This usage of astrology differs from popularized ones such as horoscopes and prescriptive lists of personality traits. Rather, this utilizes astrology as the complex spiritual philosophy focused on identifying the universal stages of societal and personal development. As with the changing of seasons, each progression through the zodiac wheel presents its own challenges and opportunities for growth (Meyer). This perfectly captures the poem’s concerns with departures and returns, rises and falls, death and rebirth.

The poem employs its astrological framework to signal that society stands on the threshold of immense upheaval. The speaker follows their reference to Aquarius (the Waterman) with “this is the age of the new dimension, / dare, seek, seek further, dare more” (Doolittle 40). As the speaker suggests, Aquarius is associated with the stage of development wherein an individual or group breaks apart old traditions and norms in order to seek and invent new ones. It is a time of chaotic transformation, revolution, destruction, and creation (Meyer). In this poem, the speaker views the destruction of the world wars as a catalyst for an Aquarian revolution; an opportunity to break things apart and put them back together in different ways, for the better or for the worse. To the speaker, Aquarius represents the daunting yet exciting chance to smash the cultural ills that led to the wars– nationalism, territorialism, obsession with power and hierarchy, expansion and control– into rubble. They warn “let us not teach / what we have learned badly / and not profited by” (Doolittle 46). If something is broken, the Aquarian age is the time to throw it away and replace it.

The poem moves on from the tumult of Aquarius into the spiritual enlightenment of Pisces. The speaker describes Pisces as such:

sub-conscious ocean where Fish
move two-ways, devour;
when identity in the depth,
would merge with the best,
octopus or shark rise
from the sea-floor;
illusion, reversion of old values,
oneness lost, madness. (40-41).

In the zodiac, Pisces is the final stage before the wheel starts again– the last step in a year, an era, or a life. Pisces invites the shedding of individuality, merging with the collective consciousness, and dissolution (similar to the state of Nirvana described by Buddhists). This sign brings the subconscious from the deep darkness and up to the surface, where it can potentially enlighten or madden (Meyer). The promise of a Piscean age excites the speaker as much as the Aquarian age. It is a time to become “voyagers, discoverers / of the not-known” (Doolittle 59). After the mass social shifts of Aquarius, the speaker predicts their sought-after entanglement with universal and spiritual truths in Pisces.

The poem, though, does not advocate for everyone to simply sit and wait out the cycle; it proposes pathways for pursuing spiritual revolution, primarily through scholarship and art. The speaker suggests that reading and writing are religious rituals unto themselves. They concede that “this search [...] has been done to death before,” but argue the worthiness of pressing on because “my mind (yours) / has its peculiar ego-centric / personal approach / to the eternal realities” (51-52). Thus, the poem presents a radically personalized approach to spirituality that brings communities together in deep and diverse thought. The individual bears responsibility for learning, thinking, and synthesizing, as well as recognizing the capacity of every other individual to do the same thing. The ritual of the “search” extends into art, particularly writing and poetry, which provide opportunities for healing and transformation. The speaker elevates the “scribe,” and tells the sword:

you are the younger brother, the latter-born,
your Triumph, however exultant
must one day be over,
in the beginning
was the Word.” (17).

The speaker’s reverence for the word references the power of the poem itself. In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” language makes and shapes worlds. The speaker hopes the poem’s words can also make new, exciting, and creative worlds of its own.

“The Walls Do Not Fall” is both a spiritual manifesto and a compassionate response to the destruction of war; it is a calling as well as a comfort. With this poem, H.D. proposes healing through working with the cycles of life and engaging in the meaningful rituals of scholarship and art. Above all, the poem is a premonition. It foretells the collapse of seemingly impenetrable traditions and the rise of new ones. H.D.’s insight appears apt in the 21st century as Americans reckon with the rapid changes and perpetual unrest of the past few decades. The world is already a completely different place from when H.D. wrote “The Walls Do Not Fall” 80 years ago, yet her words continue to comfort and inspire. As we continue to face endless obstacles to progress, it may be more important than ever to trust in the cycle of all things and uphold our responsibility to step through each turn of the wheel with strength, integrity, and courage.

Works Cited