draws attention to itself, and what we get, in truth, is less the fact than the
constatation of it: all those negatives draw attention to its presentation,
not to the fact itself. If the Image simply, actually, did present itself,
Pound wouldn’t need to write a thing. Any appreciation of the directness
of something has the paradoxical effect of drawing attention to the mode
of presentation, rather than the subject presented. Directness is atheatrical
mode in denial.
Such theatricality is nowhere more in evidence than in the shock value
of an Imagist poem that obeys all of Pound’s rules, H. D.’s ‘Hermes of the
Ways’. First published by the Poetry Bookshop, it begins:
The hard sand breaks,
And the grains of it
Are clear as wine.
Far off over the leagues of it,
The wind,
Playing on the wide shore,
Piles little ridges,
And the great waves
Break over it.^104The unique rhythmic pattern of the free verse makes its beginning as
direct and unstereotyped as Pound could want. Yet free and traditional
verse alike have line-breaks, and in both cases the fact that the line ends at
a certain point and no other means that the words around that break are
highlighted in a way that words in the middle of the line are not (although
a poem with very short lines minimises this effect). In breaking the line
with ‘of it’ and ‘over it’, the poem draws rhythmical attention to phrases
that are not syntactically the most important in the sentence: if H. D. had
closed the poem ‘And over it the great waves / Break’, it would be more
conventional and more portentous, but also less deliberately flat-footed.
In her original, the effect is one of blankness: the pattern tells us the last
words should be significant, and yet syntactically they are subordinate.
But in confronting its readership with the words’ nakedness, the poem has
changed its ground. Rather than communicate their import directly, it is
communicating the feeling of its own directness, its own status as a direct
poem. An utterly direct, accurate transmission of the poet’s sensibility
would not be noticeable as a poem at all, as Hulme realised in a self-
defeating moment: ‘if we could come into direct contact with sense and
consciousness, art would be useless and unnecessary’.^105 The problem is
Inside and outside modernism 47