Today’s Poem: The Pool

Steven Knepper writes on the myth-haunted modernist, H.D.

Narcissus, by a follower of Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, circa 1500 (Wikimedia Commons)

Steven Knepper holds the Bruce C. Gottwald, Jr. ’81 Chair for Academic Excellence at the Virginia Military Institute, where he teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies. He is the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond and co-author of a forthcoming critical introduction to the philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. Like us at Poems Ancient and Modern, Steve has an abiding interest in the Moderns, those experimentalists at the start of the last century whose artistic revolutions have now become tradition. We nurse a particular affection for the  myth-haunted strangeness of Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961), who signed her poems “H.D.” — and so we leapt at Steve’s suggestion that he write about her gnomic, existentially anxious early poem, “The Pool.” 

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Once, for an on-campus academic job interview, the college interviewing me put me up in a small house, presumably unoccupied. The key number matched the number by the door, but the house had an unnervingly lived-in look, with bicycles and boxes in the garage, books still stacked on the kitchen counter.

Shouting hello, I walked from room to room, half-expecting to meet some occupant. And lo! In a darkened doorway, a man in a suit. My heart heaved before I realized that the man was . . . me, reflected in a large bathroom mirror. I stared at my reflection for a long time. Who are you? I asked the apparent doppelganger staring back at me. Who am I?

This sense of an existential jolt offers us one way of reading Hilda Doolittle’s poem “The Pool.” The speaker encounters her own shimmering image in a pool of water, likely a tidal pool, given the beach setting of many of Doolittle’s early poems. Her 1924 collection Heliodora situates “The Pool” between two oceanic poems (“Oread” and “Thetis”). The speaker might be carrying a literal net, especially if this is a seashore poem and she is combing the tidal pools. But it is also possible that she reaches out and touches her reflection in the pool and that ripples “band” across it like a “net.”

Existential questions begin the poem (“Are you alive?”) and end it (“What are you — banded one?”). The dash visually suggests a “banded” appearance but also implies the uncanniness of one’s own image made strange. It links (“one”) and separates (“you”), suggesting both connection and alienation.

Since almost all the poems of Heliodora deal with myth in some way or another, Doolittle likely wants us to have the famous myth of Narcissus and his reflected image in mind as we read “The Pool.” We now use the word “narcissistic” to describe egotistical self-absorption. But in Ovid’s ancient Roman telling of the myth, Narcissus does not realize that he is falling in love with his own image. When he does realize it, Narcissus despairs that the vision in the pool is not actually a separate person.

Ovid’s version of the myth thus conveys not only self-absorption but also the self-alienation that attends the reflected image in “The Pool.” One could read Narcissus as the speaker of “The Pool,” paradoxically netted by the image he is trying to net. But the connection seems more allusive and indirect than that, especially since there is wonder, but no explicit mention of beauty.

H.D. in 1922 (Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, biographical details suggest other possible “nets.” Here is one: In the tearoom of the British Museum, where he sat with Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound expressed his vigorous enthusiasm for three of her poems, marking them up and signing them “H.D. Imagiste.” Was this brilliant promotion on the part of the great modernist marketer? Or a net?

Certainly, some of Doolittle’s poems display the imagist doctrines that Pound would briefly champion — especially radical concision. Yet any broad look at Doolittle’s early poetry reveals that it does not neatly match the imagist manifestos, especially in its extensive and intricate relationships to myth. In the course of their complicated relationship, Pound’s nickname for the beautiful, outdoorsy, myth-obsessed Doolittle was “Dryad.” Perhaps, like Doolittle herself, “The Pool” slides out of this net, granting us its fleeting glimpse of a Naiad of the depths.

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The Pool

by H.D.

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you — banded one?

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