Modern American Poetry

(^372) Louis L. Martz
silhouette cut of light, not shadow, and so impersonal it might
have been anyone, of almost any country. And yet there was a
distinctly familiar line about the head with the visored cap;
immediately it was somebodyunidentified indeed, yet suggesting a
question—dead brother? lost friend?^9
One thinks at once of Aldington, a soldier at the time of her anguish at his
infidelity. The second picture is “the conventional outline of a goblet or
cup”—symbol of the female. Do these two images suggest her bisexuality, the
“two loves separate” that she describes in her poem about Freud?
The third picture is the most important and given the longest
description. It is a “three-legged” image in perspective: “none other than our
old friend, the tripod of classic Delphi ... this venerated object of the cult of
the sun god, symbol of poetry and prophecy” (TTF,46). Delphi is then
emphasized a few pages later, as she concentrates her attention on these
pictures, saying, “it seems now possible that the mechanism of their
projection (from within or from without) had something to do with, or in
some way was related to, my feelings for the shrine at Delphi” (TTF,49). The
“idea of Delphi has always touched me very deeply,” she adds, recalling that
she had said to her friend Bryher (Winifred Ellerman), while recovering
from her 1919 illness, “If I could only feel that I could walk the sacred way
to Delphi, I know I would get well.” In section 36 she clarifies the meaning
of this picture, beginning with the thought that “all through time, there had
been a tradition of warnings or messages from another world or another state
of being.” Delphi, she reminds us, “was the shrine of the Prophet and
Musician, the inspiration of artists and the patron of physicians.” Then she
applies the meaning of Delphi to her own situation. “Religion, art, and
medicine, through the later ages, became separated; they grow further apart
from day to day.” But now for herself, under the ministrations of this
“blameless physician,” Sigmund Freud, the three are growing together, as
her third picture indicates: “These three working together, to form a new
vehicle of expression or a new form of thinking or of living, might be
symbolized by the tripod, the third of the images on the wall before me”
(TTF,50–51).
The tripod, she explains, “was the symbol of prophecy, prophetic
utterance of occult or hidden knowledge; the Priestess or Pythoness of
Delphi sat on the tripod while she pronounced her verse couplets, the
famous Delphic utterances which it was said could be read two ways.”
(“Verse couplets”: is this perhaps one reason for adopting the form of
couplets for her wartime Trilogy,a form not at all characteristic of her earlier