Richard Aldington and H.D.

One Hundred Years On

When I think of Aldington and H.D. I think of the Sixties, free love, tragedy and war.  The Sixties and free love because when they met in 1911 he was 19, she 25.  They discussed poetry in Soho restaurants, visits to the British Museum, talking of Classical Greece and the Gods.  They married in 1913 having spent time traveling in Italy together before marrying.  Their child was stillborn in the early days of World War 1, a tragedy presaging the tragedy of war.  No anti-war protestor, Aldington enlisted early and survived trench warfare in France which changed him utterly. 

In 1907,  H.D. had been engaged to Ezra Pound, in Philadelphia.  Aldington and H.D. met each other in London.  They were introduced by Pound as poets and sanctified as Imagists. They lived, for a time, like gods surrounded by mortals, flower children.  The war changed their world forever.  They separated but remained friends, were divorced in 1938.  Aldington gained fame as a war poet and a novelist.  H.D.'s poetry was neglected until the Sixties made free love acceptable again, although Aldington anthologized three of her poems in The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World, first published in 1941.

Aldington became infamous when in a 1955 biography he pulled T.E. Lawrence off the pedestal erected for him by the British Establishment, notably Winston Churchill and Robert Graves.   He lived most of his life outside England, was a friend of D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell.  His obituary said he was "an angry young man" and "an angry old man to the end". 

H.D. is probably better known now than Aldington.  Bisexual, she had a child while living with an artist during the war years while Aldington was in France.   Later she formed a lasting relationship with Bryher, the penname of Annie Winifred Ellerman. She lived most of her life in Switzerland and was a patient of Freud.

It's been roughly one hundred years since Aldington left H.D.and her baby, by another man, with Bryher.

                                               

Possession (Richard Aldington)                                                From Hymen (H.D.)

I must possess you utterly                                                     Never more will the wind

And utterly must you possess me;                                         Cherish you again,

So even if that dreamer's tale                                                 Never more will the rain.

Of heaven and hell be true

There shall be two spirits rived together                                 Never more

Either in whatever peace be heaven                                       Shall we find you bright

Or in the icy whirlwind that is hell                                          In the snow and wind.

For those who loved each other more than God-

So that the other spirits shall cry out:                                     The snow is melted,

'Ah!  Look how the ancient love yet holds to them                 The snow is gone,

That these two ghosts are never driven apart                         And you are flown:

But kiss with shadowy kisses and still take

Joy from the mingling of their misty limbs!'                          Like a bird out of our hand,

                                                                                             Like a light out of our heart,

                                                                                              You are gone.

           

Dick Russell

A shorter version published in Orbis, #160; 2012